NewsTrust - Best of 2008 - Most Recent Stories

Gay Marriage: Our Mutual Joy

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Newsweek - By Lisa Miller - Dec. 15 (Opinion) - Let's try for a minute to take the religious conservatives at their word and define marriage as the Bible does. Shall we look to Abraham, the great patriarch, who slept with his servant when he discovered his beloved wife Sarah was infertile? Or to Jacob, who fathered children with four different women (two sisters and their servants)? Abraham, Jacob, David, Solomon and the kings of Judah and Israel—all these fathers and heroes were polygamists. The New Testament model of marriage is hardly better. Jesus himself was single and preached an indifference to earthly attachments—especially family. The apostle Paul (also single) regarded marriage as an act of last resort for those unable to contain their animal lust. "It is better to marry than to burn with passion," says the apostle, in one of the most lukewarm endorsements of a treasured institution ever uttered. Would any contemporary heterosexual married couple—who likely woke up on their wedding day harboring some optimistic and newfangled ideas about gender equality and romantic love—turn to the Bible as a how-to script?

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Serious Error in Diebold Voting Software Caused Lost Ballots in California County

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Wired - By Kim Zetter - Dec. 09 (News Report) - An investigation shows that the paper mail-in ballots were scanned properly by officials into the central-count optical-scan system made by Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold Election Systems) -- a receipt printed out by the machine at the time they were scanned on November 1, three days before the election, indicates that the machine recorded the ballots. The ballots even showed up in preliminary tallies counted on election night on November 4 and in a report printed out on November 23. But some time after this point, the tabulation software inexplicably deleted the ballots without election officials ever knowing.

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A case study in housing collapse

Sun, 30 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

St. Petersburg Times - By Michael Van Sickler - Nov. 30 (Investigative Report) - Thousands of miles from the trading floors of global stock markets, an abandoned house in one of Tampa's poorest neighborhoods is an improbable place to learn about why the world's financial system is collapsing. But if you want to understand how we got into this mess, the stucco house at 4809 N 17th St. isn't a bad place to start.

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The Joshua Generation

Sun, 16 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New Yorker - By David Remnick - Nov. 16 (Special Report) - Barack Obama could not run his campaign for the Presidency based on political accomplishment or on the heroic service of his youth. His record was too slight. His Democratic and Republican opponents were right: he ran largely on language, on the expression of a country’s potential and the self-expression of a complicated man who could reflect and lead that country. And a powerful thematic undercurrent of his oratory and prose was race. Not race as invoked by his predecessors in electoral politics or in the civil-rights movement, not race as an insistence on tribe or on redress; rather, Obama made his biracial ancestry a metaphor for his ambition to create a broad coalition of support, to rally Americans behind a narrative of moral and political progress. He was not its hero, but he just might be its culmination.

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It's time

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Nov. 01 (Editorial) - It is impossible to forecast how important any presidency will be. Back in 2000 America stood tall as the undisputed superpower, at peace with a generally admiring world. The main argument was over what to do with the federal government’s huge budget surplus. Nobody foresaw the seismic events of the next eight years. When Americans go to the polls next week the mood will be very different. The United States is unhappy, divided and foundering both at home and abroad. Its self-belief and values are under attack.

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How Will Treasury Pick the Banks to Save? Just Trust Them

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ProPublica - By Paul Kiel - Oct. 22 (Special Report) - Lacking clear criteria, the process lacks crucial transparency, said Ross Levine, a professor of economics at Brown University. "It seems an essential part of the U.S. approach to government that we don't trust the angelic behavior of anybody."

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An eroding model for health insurance

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Lisa Girion, Michael A. Hiltzik - Oct. 21 (Special Report) - The health insurance system has become increasingly expensive and inaccessible. It leaves patients responsible for bills they understood would be covered, squeezes doctors and hospitals, and tries to avoid even minuscule risks, such as providing coverage to a newborn with no serious illness.

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Maverick Misleads

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

FactCheck - By Lori Robertson, D'Angelo Gore - Sep. 09 (News Analysis) - McCain's campaign launched a TV ad touting his running mate, Palin, and offering a comparison to Obama. Some of its claims are off the mark

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The real Sarah Palin: An Apostle of Alaska

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Jeffrey Bartholet, Karen Breslau, Andrew Murr, Mark Hosenball, Suzanne Smalley, Michael Isikoff, Michael Hirsh, Daniel Stone, Holly Bailey, Lisa Miller, Sarah Kliff, Katie Paul - Sep. 07 (Special Report) - John McCain was not her dream pick. Only a year ago, when the republican primaries were just beginning, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin told Newsweek that she wasn't enthusiastic about anyone in the GOP field. McCain was languishing at 7 percent in the polls. Mike Huckabee was reduced to playing his electric bass to get attention. Palin, driving with a Newsweek reporter along the highway from Anchorage to Wasilla, said she could understand why the country was enthralled by the race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. "When you talk about the Republican Party needing appealing candidates, darn right they do!" she said. "The Democrats, whether you like them or not ... there is some dynamic there, and it's something that the Republicans I think have lacked for some time."

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The War We Don't Know

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By Mark Ames - Aug. 14 (Opinion) - While Russia and America see the conflict in abstract terms about spheres of influence and protecting allies, for Ossetians, who still recall the centuries of massacres Georgians committed against them, it is highly personal. They will still recall the Georgian massacres in the early 1920s, when Georgia was briefly independent, which exterminated up to 8 percent of the Ossetian population.

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A threat explodes in Georgia

Sat, 09 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Anne Applebaum - Aug. 09 (Opinion) - For the best possible illustration of why Islamic terrorism may one day be considered the least of our problems, look no farther than the BBC's split-screen coverage of yesterday's Olympic opening ceremonies.

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Preparing the Battlefield

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Seymour Hirsch - Jun. 30 (Special Report) - Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country's religious leadership.

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McCain, spying and executive power: A complete reversal in 6 months

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Jun. 03 (Opinion) - Last December, the GOP nominee was giving answers that were the same as those of the ACLU and Russ Feingold. Now, he sounds like John Yoo and Dick Cheney.

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Tom Brokaw's Disturbing Defense of the Media and Iraq

Sat, 31 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Editor & Publisher - By Greg Mitchell - May. 31 (Opinion) - What is most appalling, however, is that it took McClellan's book to produce a debate about this tremendously vital subject at all....[in the] coverage of the fifth anniversary of the start of the Iraq war back in March, the media reviewed every aspect of the war and pointed fingers everywhere, except at the media. There was almost no self-assessment, after five years of war.

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Whatever Happened to Iraq?

Wed, 28 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

American Journalism Review - By Sherry Ricchiardi - May. 28 (News Analysis) - During the early stages of shock and awe, Americans were glued to the news as Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in Baghdad and sweat-soaked Marines bivouacked in his luxurious palaces. It was a huge story when President Bush landed on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, and declared major combat operations were over. By March 2008, a striking reversal had taken place

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The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Sun, 11 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Council on Foreign Relations - By Eben Kaplan, Jeremy Sherlick - May. 11 (Special Report) - An in-depth, multimedia look at the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its geopolitical repercussions. This interactive, graphical overview covers this crisis from a variety of angles, with a detailed timeline of events and extensive documentation.

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Love Thy Neighbor

Tue, 06 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Columbia Journalism Review - By Tim Townsend - May. 06 (Interview) - As a reporter covering religion at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for the last four years, I've been a witness to attitudes and language on my beat that would make veteran political reporters cringe. Even the blog I wrote for the paper, The God Beat, became such a target for corrosive, hateful comments that I was forced to shut it down.

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Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Barstow - Apr. 20 (News Report) - The Pentagon has cultivated "military analysts" in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the Bush administration's wartime performance.

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