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New test to detect autism in babies?

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 11:12:11 -0800

Boston Globe - Feb. 22 - No question detecting autism at the earliest possible stage can be useful for implementing early treatment. But can autism really...

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Democrats err in bid to muzzle senators

Mon, 03 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By John E. Sununu - Jan. 03 (Opinion) - The framers carefully designed the Senate to be more deliberative and more difficult to force into quick decisions. The rules and structure protect the rights of the minority, the voice of individual senators, and, by extension, the states they represent. In particular, the formulation of the Senate is meant to protect the interests of small states from the domination of those more populous. These characteristics serve the interests of the entire nation by keeping the union strong.

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GOP winning over Obama supporters, poll indicates

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Jim Rutenberg, Megan Thee-Brenan - Oct. 28 (News) - Critical parts of the coalition that delivered President Obama to the White House in 2008 and gave Democrats control of Congress in 2006 are switching their allegiance to Republicans in the final phase of the midterm congressional elections, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

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The incandescent bulb, an obituary

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Jane Brox - Aug. 01 (Opinion) - It’s difficult to imagine what life will be like without incandescence. There are, at the moment, few options to replace “old-fashioned bulbs,” which means our near future threatens to be illuminated largely by the cold, off-color glow of compact fluorescents. For a panicky few this seems incomprehensible: They have begun hoarding packages of filament bulbs in their linen closets and basements.

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On immigration, Patrick is measured

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Maria Sacchetti, Marissa Lang - Jul. 22 (News) - Governor Deval Patrick did not flinch when, during his historic campaign four years ago, he was asked if he favored allowing illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses. Many Democrats avoided the explosive issue, but Patrick said issuing licenses was safer than having untrained and uninsured drivers on the road. Patrick’s approach to illegal immigration has undergone a marked shift, from populist to pragmatic, at a time when the national battle over the issue has exploded in Arizona and spread to Massachusetts.

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Surprising threat to democracy: our brains

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Joe Keohane - Jul. 11 (News Analysis) - Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

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Corruption fight begins at home

Fri, 25 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Garry Emmons - Jun. 25 (Opinion) - DURING THE G8/G20 summits that begin today in Canada, the global economy and international development will be topics of earnest discussion. Lurking at the margins of this polite conversation will be the skunk at the garden party: corruption.

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Bottlers fight push for federal water tax

Mon, 10 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Alan Wirzbicki - May. 10 (News Report) - An effort in Congress to spend tens of billions of dollars to fix the nation’s aging water systems is facing stiff opposition from soda and bottled water companies, which are major beneficiaries of publicly owned supplies but are fighting a proposal to tax them to pay for the upgrades.

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Class difference

Sun, 09 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Boston Globe - By Riddhi Shah - May. 09 (Special Report) - The last two decades have witnessed the rising popularity of low-cost private schools across the developing world. Researchers estimate that there are now 1 million budget schools in countries like Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, China, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Uganda. Started by local entrepreneurs, these schools are most often located in urban slums, operate out of a few rooms, and are run by teachers who are paid less than half the salary of a government teacher. Few receive state support or external funding.

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Alex Beam explains why he’s not all a-Twitter

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Alex Beam - Mar. 02 (Opinion) - The pope doesn’t. The Dalai Lama does. Jon Stewart doesn’t. Conan does. I don’t. Eat meat? Go to church on Sunday? Work for a living? No, the operative verb is tweet. Twitter, the inane “news’’ feed favored by slackers too lazy to read any message that doesn’t fit on the back of their hand, made big news last week in Los Angeles, Moscow, and beyond.

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Why Google can say no to China

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Boston Globe - By Scott Moskowitz - Jan. 30 (Opinion) - Google’s move may amount to a savvy business gambit, but of a different, perhaps more daring nature, than many Chinese imagine. The prospect of a completely open Chinese market, where Google could compete on an even playing field with Baidu, is potentially worth so much that Google may be willing to risk its existing market share. Even moderate success could incite other Western corporations that have previously backed down from challenging the Chinese government. If this occurs, the Communist Party could find itself on the ropes.

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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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