NewsTrust - All Rated Stories

Notes on the Death of Osama bin Laden

Mon, 02 May 2011 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Steve Coll - May. 02 (News Analysis) - No doubt there will be time to reflect more deeply about the news announced by President Obama last night. For now, I thought it might be useful to annotate some of the initial headlines. On where he was found: Abbottabad is essentially a military-cantonment city in Pakistan, in the hills to the north of the capital of Islamabad, in an area where much of the land is controlled or owned by the Pakistani Army and retired Army officers. Although the city is technically in what used to be called the Northwest Frontier Province, it lies on the far eastern side of the province and is as close to Pakistani-held Kashmir as it is to the border city of Peshawar.

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Congressman Darrell Issa has had some troubles of his own.

Mon, 17 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Ryan Lizza - Jan. 17 (Special Report) - The fire had started at a workbench where light bulbs for bug zappers were tested. Almost everything of value was gone. Fortunately for Issa, he had recently increased his fire insurance.

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The Jobs Crisis

Tue, 28 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By James Surowiecki, The New Yorker - Dec. 28 (Opinion) - The recession has been over for more than a year now, but so many people are out of work that it doesn’t feel like much of a recovery. In November, the economy added just thirty-nine thousand jobs. The failure to translate G.D.P. growth into job growth has given us an unemployment rate that remains near ten per cent (twice what it was in 2007), and has swelled the ranks of the long-term unemployed.

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As The World Burns

Sun, 03 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Ryan Lizza - Oct. 03 (Opinion) - On April 20, 2010, Senators John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joseph Lieberman, along with three aides, visited Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, at the White House. The legislators had spent seven months writing a comprehensive bill that

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Small Change

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 09:39:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Malcolm Gladwell - Sep. 28 (Opinion) - The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns... But there is something else at work here, in the outsized enthusiasm for social media. Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.

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Covert Operations

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jane Mayer - Aug. 23 (Investigative Report) - The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

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Filibusters, arcane rules, and obstructions in the Senate.

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By George Packer - Aug. 03 (Special Report) - Between speeches, there are quorum calls, time killers in which a Senate clerk calls the roll at the rate of one name every few minutes. The press gallery, above the dais, is typically deserted, as journalists prefer to hunker down in the press lounge, surfing the Web for analysis of current Senate negotiations; television screens alert them if something of interest actually happens in the chamber. The only people who pay attention to a speech are the Senate stenographers. On this afternoon, two portly bald men in suits stood facing the speaker from a few feet away, tapping at the transcription machines, which resembled nineteenth-century cash registers, slung around their necks. The Senate chamber is an intimate room where men and women go to talk to themselves for the record.

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Letting Go

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Atul Gawande - Jul. 29 (Editorial) - Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left...People have concerns besides simply prolonging their lives. Surveys of patients with terminal illness find that their top priorities include, in addition to avoiding suffering, being with family, having the touch of others, being mentally aware, and not becoming a burden to others. Our system of technological medical care has utterly failed to meet these needs, and the cost of this failure is measured in far more than dollars. The hard question we face, then, is not how we can afford this system’s expense. It is how we can build a health-care system that will actually help dying patients achieve what’s most important to them at the end of their lives.

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Borderlines

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By William Finnegan - Jul. 23 (Opinion) - The southern border, far from being “unsecured,” is in better shape than it has been for years—better managed and less porous. It has been the beneficiary of security-budget increases since September 11th, which have helped slow the pace of illegal entries, if not as dramatically as the economic crash did. Violent crime, though rising in Mexico, has fallen this side of the border: in Southwestern border counties it has dropped more than thirty per cent in the past two decades. It’s down in Senator McCain’s Arizona. According to F.B.I. statistics, the four safest big cities in the United States—San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso, and Austin—are all in border states.

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Another oil spill, another opportunity to act.

Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Elizabeth Kolbert - May. 25 (Opinion) - Will the Gulf spill, like the Santa Barbara spill, prove to be the kind of disaster that jolts the nation into action? So far, the signs are not encouraging. Members of the Drill, Baby, Drill Party have blocked efforts to raise the liability limits for oil spills, and have yet to muster a single sponsor for climate legislation. At the same time, they have sought to portray the spill as President Obama’s Katrina.

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Some Nukes

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Hendrik Hertzberg - Mar. 22 (News Analysis) - Carl Pope, the executive chairman of the Sierra Club, has said that Obama’s nods to nuclear “may ease the politics around comprehensive clean-energy and climate legislation, but we do not believe that they are the best policy.” But the best, as often happens in our sclerotic political system, may not be among the available choices. As we stumble our way toward an acceptable approach to energy and climate change, the merely good might be the best that we can get.

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The Trial

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Jane Mayer - Feb. 10 (Special Report) - On December 5th, several hundred people gathered in Foley Square, in lower Manhattan, and withstood a drenching rainstorm for two hours in order to send a message to Attorney General Eric Holder. A JumboTron, set up by the protesters, played clips of Holder’s recent testimony before Congress, in . . .

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Suffering

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By George Packer - Jan. 18 (Comment) - The night after the earthquake, Haitians who had lost their homes, or who feared that their houses might collapse, slept outdoors, in the streets and parks of Port-au-Prince. In Place Saint-Pierre, across the street from the Kinam Hotel, in the suburb of Pétionville, hundreds of people lay under the sky, and many of them sang hymns: “God, you are the one who gave me life. Why are we suffering?”

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Threats

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Steve Coll - Jan. 14 (Comment) - In office, Obama has begun to reframe counterterrorism strategy. He has crafted a posture of strategic patience, premised upon a forward defense and the durability of American constitutional values. When the White House reorganized the staffs of the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council last year, it created a new “resilience policy” directorate.

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Green Giant

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By Evan Osnos - Dec. 23 (Special Report) - On March 3, 1986, four of China’s top weapons scientists—each a veteran of the missile and space programs—sent a private letter to Deng Xiaoping, the leader of the country. Their letter was a warning: Decades of relentless focus on militarization had crippled the country’s civilian scientific establishment; China must join the world’s xin jishu geming, the “new technological revolution,” they said, or it would be left behind. They called for an élite project devoted to technology ranging from biotech to space research. Deng agreed, and scribbled on the letter, “Action must be taken on this now.” This was China’s “Sputnik moment,” and the project was code-named the 863 Program, for the year and month of its birth.

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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

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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.

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The White House’s war with Fox News

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Louis Menand - Oct. 26 (Opinion) - In 2008, half the people who watched the Fox News Channel were over sixty-three, which is the oldest demographic in the cable-news business, and, according to a poll, the majority of the ones who watched the most strident programs, such as Sean Hannity’s and Bill O’Reilly’s shows, were men. All that chesty fulminating apparently functions as political Cialis. Fox News shows should probably carry a warning: Contact your doctor if you have rage lasting more than four hours.

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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,

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Are Obama's judges really liberals?

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jeffrey Toobin - Sep. 16 (Special Report) - The Obama Administration wanted to send a message with the President’s first nomination to a federal court. “There was a real conscious decision to use that first appointment to say, ‘This is a new way of doing things. This is a post-partisan choice,’ ”

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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.

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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 . . .

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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