For anyone who wants to make a serious play for the Latino vote -- and not just go through the motions -- here's what you need to know: Latinos are single-issue voters.
America's image of New Yorkers combines swagger, style and an unwillingness to get pushed around. Humphrey Bogart once warned a Nazi commander in "Casablanca" that "there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn't advise you to try to invade." Seventy years ago, movie audiences would have laughed in appreciation of the city's toughness.
Anyone who has ever been unemployed understands that unemployment insurance is a lifeline for the jobless and their families. But that lifeline is now slipping away for the long-term unemployed, as cuts to federal unemployment extensions enacted by Congress earlier this year gradually take hold.
Is Syria Barack Obama's Rwanda? The Stanford University scholar, Fouad Ajami, usually an astute and wise observer on matters Middle Eastern, raised this question (and false analogy) with CNN's Anderson Cooper several weeks ago.
Thursday afternoon, Barack Obama presided over the unveiling of George W. Bush's official portrait in the White House, a warm event that reminds us: It feels like years since President Dubya regaled the world with his famous spoonerisms. His retirement has been defined by an awkward silence. While John McCain's endorsement was trumpeted by Mitt Romney, Bush delivered his in just four words. "I'm for Mitt Romney," he shouted to a journalist as an elevator door closed between them. If, just for old time's sake, Bush had said, "I'm for Ritt Momney," it would have been perfect.
The jury in the John Edwards case rendered exactly the right verdict. Of course they couldn't make up their mind on most of the charges. No rational person could. The judge essentially instructed them to get into John Edwards' mind (as well as into the minds of several other actors in this political soap opera) and to determine precisely what his intention was in receiving money from friends.
It's astounding how fast the words of a 22-year-old woman, her life suddenly cut short, have spread across the Internet and into the hearts and minds of people all over the world.
For four decades, consecutive generations of the Assad family -- Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father as Syrian president in 2000 -- have interfered in Lebanon to the west, and Iraq to the east. Syrian agents assassinated rivals and pumped in fighters.
There is no doubt that Latinos are a growing political force in America. One out of every six Americans is Latino. Latinos are turning places such as North Carolina into new battleground states while remaining critical in Florida, Nevada and New Mexico.
American higher education is in the cross hairs of a heated national debate over the value and cost of a college degree. Yet in China, our fiercest global economic competitor, the popularity of American colleges and universities might be at an all-time high.
Imagine if every time you went to the pharmacy, shopping for medications was a complete guessing game. What if drug makers weren't required to disclose ingredients in their products or prove their safety, leaving you without a way to determine whether what you're buying is safe for you and your family? You would live in fear that the medicine you purchased to make your child feel better could actually harm them.
When a slow-motion massacre has unfolded over the course of 15 months, it's easy to lose the world's attention. But even the most jaded gasped in horror as news emerged of the latest carnage inflicted on the Syrian people. The images from the town of Houla defied belief.
With Greece probably heading for an exit from the euro, the European and global economies may be facing disaster. However, there is still time for European leaders to reverse this destructive dynamic with one simple, outside-the-box solution: Instead of pushing Greece out of the eurozone, Germany should voluntarily withdraw and reissue its beloved deutsche mark.
The Keystone XL pipeline has turned into a poster child for political posturing. While it is merely one of many pipelines crisscrossing North America, this project has become "red meat" that both sides of the congressional aisle are using to weaken each other in an election season. To make matters more complicated, Canadian public and private-sector officials have jumped into the fray by coming to town to extol the virtues of the pipeline.
"Justin Bieber accused of roughing up photographer." When I read this headline, my initial reaction was: Who would admit to being beaten up by Justin Bieber?
On the surface, the first round of the Egyptian presidential election seemed to show that the Muslim Brotherhood and the remnants of the Mubarak regime are locked in mortal combat for the political soul of Egypt -- as Brotherhood candidate Mohamed Morsi faces pro-military candidate Ahmed Shafik in a second round of voting in June.
I was watching yet another annoying political ad produced by some super PAC of which I've never heard, and all I could think was: "Sheesh, it's not even June, and I'm already sick of this stuff. With five months to go until the election, I think a steady diet of this junk will drive me into a mental institution."
Ever since the Trayvon Martin case came to national attention, George Zimmerman has been described by some as having racially profiled the 17-year-old before he was shot and killed.
Rudy Giuliani committed a classic Washington gaffe on CNN's "State of the Union" this past Sunday -- he told the truth.
Afghan schoolgirls sit in the spotlight as their classrooms face alleged poison attacks in the north and threats from insurgents in the south. Questions surround the shadowy incidents, which come at a fragile time in the country's transition. And in many ways, as goes girls' education, so goes the country's procession toward progress.
With ticket sales closing in on $100 million, the surprise hit of the year is "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel," a film about seven English retirees who travel to India to take up residence at the rundown Marigold Hotel, which, according to its misleading brochures, will provide them with inexpensive comfort in their remaining years.
Odd as it may sound, one great person to ask about the real cost of the Vatican leaks scandal, rekindled with the arrest of the pope's butler on charges of stealing a raft of secret documents, would be the Rev. Matthew Thomas, pastor of Holy Family Catholic Church in the Indian province of Kashmir.
After the first competitive elections in Egypt's history, many Egyptians find themselves straddling the divide between the deposed regime of Hosni Mubarak and its 84-year-old Islamist adversary, the Muslim Brotherhood. Polarization has long been a problem for Egypt. Now there is more of it than ever.
In Texas, where voters will go to the polls on Tuesday, politics can be brutal.
Some observers have been careful not to name the violence in Syria a civil war, lest it become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Well, the child has to be called by its name.
According to Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, it is payback time for Greece.
A week into Facebook's debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange, its initial offering price of $38 per share dropped to $31.91. Retail investors' fears deepened as they realize they are losing a lot of money.
One of the unintended consequences of the Arab revolutions has become evident in Israel, where a surge in the number of refugees from Africa has created new tensions in a country with no shortage of practical and ethical dilemmas.
In November 2011, The Boston Globe had a panel on "cyberetiquette." We met in a theater at Boston Globe headquarters. On the stage was a moderator, a Globe reporter, and two of the Globe's regular "advice and manners" columnists. And then there was me, there, I suppose to represent the cyberworld and where it might take us.
Memorial Day weekend has, over the years, turned in large part into something it was not originally intended to be:
In a recent discussion of what his administration might accomplish, Mitt Romney claimed that "by virtue of the policies that we put in place, we'd get the unemployment rate down to 6%, and perhaps a little lower," over a period of four years.
Memorial Day is here and millions of Americans will be hitting the road to see family and friends, take a breather away from home. And luckily, after months of sky-high gas prices at the pump, they will find lower gas prices. Let's be grateful for this relief, even as we know prices can shoot back up with little warning -- as they did earlier in the spring -- bringing an unwelcome economic sting on top of the already tough situation many families are facing.
Legend has it that when Napoleon's second-in-command asked his boss if he preferred a courageous general or a brilliant general he replied: "What I want is a lucky general."
Normally, its viewers don't associate "Eurovision" with global politics. The annual singing show is a camp retread of the cultural wasteland of the 1970s -- all crashing ballads, gaudy europop and singing penguins. Britain has signaled its contempt for the contest by sending 76-year-old Engelbert Humperdinck as its representative, a man once regarded as a stud but who now looks eerily like one of those Mexican mummies. The crooner was born two decades before Eurovision even started, and it's touch and go whether he'll survive the weekend.
May 25, National Missing Children's Day, is a day on which we honor and remember missing children. This date was chosen specifically because it is the date in 1979 when 6-year-old Etan Patz went missing on his way to school in New York.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." This is the first line of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Whatever the outcome of Facebook's public offering of stock, the social network has already enriched quite a few ? as well as famously offered many hundreds of millions of people a new virtual social world. Yet critics claim that Facebook is hastening the demise of privacy, which as the cliché goes, is already on life support.
The United States has a dignity problem. The concept of dignity is recognized by law in countries all over the world. It is a cornerstone of both international humanitarian law, which governs the treatment of prisoners of war, and international human rights law.
Today's 30-somethings are the first generation whose children are coming of age alongside the social Web.
For some, this week in Europe will be consumed by a singing contest. Eurovision. A contest where musical ambassadors from all over Europe and beyond come together as an instrument for political jockeying... I mean to showcase their talent in a performance of free expression.
Facebook's IPO was all the rage Friday. Retail investors -- people like you, me and our neighbors -- flocked to the offering in hopes of returning to those glory days when a dramatic rise in stock price was a given.
The Baghdad talks over Iran's nuclear program concluded inconclusively with a decision to continue negotiating in Moscow next month. How could they have ended otherwise? Too much suspicion, mistrust and too many complex issues to imagine an early breakthrough. At the same time, the uncertainties reflect something else too.
More than 10 million people -- almost one in two men, women and children -- in Yemen -- are facing a looming catastrophe. Families are surviving, but only just. Food and fuel price spikes, coupled with political instability, have left Yemen's economy in tatters.
"Why is the teen birth rate in the United States so high, and why does it matter?" Those questions are posed in the title of a new paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives getting a good deal of applause on the Internet.
The earthquake and tsunami in northeastern Japan on March 11 last year took an estimated 19,000 lives, caused the evacuation of about 300,000 people, and set off the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl. The meltdowns of the Fukushima Daiichi reactors ended Japan's plans to produce half of its electricity through nuclear energy.
You've probably read those articles about how, in the United States, minorities are becoming the majority. That's a polite way of describing what is really going on. Namely, that the U.S. population is becoming more Latino and less white. More than any other group, it is Latinos who are driving demographic changes.
Rather than getting ready to attract more tourists in its high season, Greece is headed toward the polls again on June 17. In the midst of domestic political uncertainty, more and more outside observers agree that "Grexit" -- the prospect of Greece leaving the euro -- has become inevitable.
It's always been a mystery to me why Republican lawmakers who denounce the evils of government choose to run for office. If your belief is that the private sector holds the answers to all that ails us, it seems like you would want to go out and prove the case. So the May 9 vote by the House GOP to eliminate the American Community Survey, which collects statistics about the nation's population, is confusing.
As the presidential campaign veers off onto the Bain Capital ramp, the predictable arguments ensue: Is the turn simply a political attack meant to distract from bad economic news? (So says Mitt Romney). Or is it an important, valid argument at the heart of the contest? (So says President Barack Obama.)
At the NATO summit in Chicago, President Obama and leaders of America's NATO allies agreed on an "irreversible" plan to withdraw from Afghanistan. But challenges remain.
Each spring, I monitor the list of commencement speakers at our nation's leading colleges and universities. Who is chosen, and who is not, tells us a lot about academia's perception of the most important voices in America.
After an astounding debut on Friday, Facebook's shares have tumbled for the most part. Is the most highly anticipated technology IPO in recent years a failure?
A leather-faced Egyptian fruit seller said it best: "The revolution was like a beautiful woman. She charmed us, and we fell in love with her and killed the tyrant to marry her, but she was just a trick -- another burden to add to our heavy load, and we are falling out of love."
Do you know how long your cell phone company keeps records of whom you text, who calls you or what places you have traveled? Do you know how often cell phone companies turn over this information to the police and whether they first ask the police to get a warrant based on probable cause?
The one thing that Egyptians know for certain is that their next president is not a woman. That is because there are no female candidates contesting the presidential elections.
As Egyptians prepare for their milestone presidential election this week, thousands of activist youths who spearheaded the revolution -- the very ones who made the election possible -- will not be casting a vote. Instead, they are in prison, facing military trials.
Should men be routinely screened for prostate cancer? This question has been asked ever since the prostate specific antigen test, or PSA, became widely available more than two decades ago.
It feels as if I've been living a double life all of these years, and I do not want to deceive you, or myself, any longer. The burden has become too heavy, the struggle to deny my true self, too great.
There are more elephants in India than Mormons. Five of the rare Mormons are in a Bible class in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which occupies a portion of a red residential building in south Delhi.
As many as 5.4 million Americans are living with Alzheimer's disease. That number includes my mother-in-law, who started showing signs of the disease in 2007. Standing beside all those living with Alzheimer's are more than 15 million family members and friends who provide them with care and everyday support. That includes my husband, his siblings, our kids and me.
When Iranian officials arrive at the next round of nuclear talks in Baghdad on May 23, they will seek to advance several of their own goals, while only making modest changes to their nuclear program.
Congress is reaching a point where it will no longer be able to function at all. Over the past two years, some members of the Republican Party have ramped up the partisan wars on Capitol Hill. They are threatening to bring the legislative process to a standstill.
The European financial crisis is poorly understood in the United States.
How can it be that we are firmly into the 21st century and reading claims that birth control pills can cause prostate cancer and abort babies? Or, my personal favorite, that a woman can be considered pregnant before her egg unites with a sperm?
Amid the buzz over the Facebook IPO, the ever-evolving theories about how Twitter is reshaping our communications and speculation about where the next social media-enabled protest or revolution will occur, there is an important question we've largely ignored. What are the real effects of all this on the huge segment of the population most affected by social media themselves: our children and our teens?
Have you ever wondered what is inside your dental plaque? Probably not. But this question is now being asked not only by dentists, but also by archaeologists.
A very nice married couple from Canada struck up a conversation in a restaurant where we were having dinner. At one point the husband said that, earlier in his life, he had played with some buddies in a rock band.
Today marks the 508th anniversary of the death of Christopher Columbus.
Shortly after President Barack Obama was inaugurated, he said that his re-election effort will be judged largely on the economy.
If democracy had existed in ancient Egypt, then not a single pyramid would have been built.
On Saturday, a company called SpaceX was scheduled to launch the first private mission to the International Space Station, demonstrating a freight-carrying capability NASA gave up when it retired its fleet of space shuttles in July. (The flight was aborted at the last second after a faulty valve was discovered; SpaceX officials said the launch was postponed till Tuesday or Wednesday.)
Until the rerun of the Greek elections scheduled for June 17, we will witness an unprecedented game of brinkmanship. The game will be played along the following lines.
The events of the past few weeks have made increasingly probable what was once considered impossible: Greece may exit the euro.
Afghanistan's recent signings of strategic partnerships with the United States and other countries have provided a measure of reassurance to Afghans about the international community's sustained engagement in the country beyond 2014, when the drawdown of NATO combat forces will be complete. But these documents are short on specifics and do not fully tackle the political, economic and regional challenges that need to be addressed so the Afghan army and police can take responsibility for the security of the country.
It used to be that when Americans thought of Mexico, they imagined a festive getaway where margaritas flowed, mariachis played, and every day was Cinco de Mayo.
Facebook's $104 billion initial public offering comes at a time when the United States is suffering a bout of self-doubt. Many wonder if America is falling behind as other countries are catching up fast. And yet the Facebook phenomenon did not occur in a vacuum.
Donna Summer defined the disco era. Her brazenly sexual hits "Love To Love You Baby" and "I Feel Love" horrified some and delighted many more when they came out. They also helped to propel disco into a national phenomenon. Even now, the sound of her voice -- controlled yet passionate -- summons up the hedonistic, willful spirit of the late 1970s.
Here we go again. The perennial question of: "Would you rather own shares in a major financial conglomerate or manage one?" comes up as JPMorgan Chase loses more than $2 billion in trading bets.
Time magazine's recent cover story featuring Jamie Lynne Grumet breastfeeding her almost four-year-old son raised a firestorm about different styles of parenting. Along with the headline -- "Are you mom enough?" -- the piece makes every mother question whether she should practice attachment parenting and in the process, embrace all things natural. Wear your baby! Make your own baby food! Breastfeed! Sleep with your baby! Give birth at home -- and don't use painkillers!
The relationship between France and Germany is the barometer of the political health of Europe.
A woman in Ohio recently wrote us about her struggles in finding the time and the money to take care of her health. Billie wrote, "I am 33 years old and without Planned Parenthood I would have never found out in time that I'm a woman with precancerous cells in my uterus and cervix. I cannot afford to pay for my health care, and by them having a sliding scale I could afford it or else otherwise I may have died from cervical cancer. I wouldn't have found out about it in time. ... (Now) I can see my children grow up."
Barack Obama's appearance on "The View" on Tuesday topped a week spent cozying up to the world of entertainment, including a dinner hosted by George Clooney that raised $15 million and a $5,000-a-plate extravaganza with Ricky Martin.
Conventional wisdom has it that President Barack Obama's campaign four years ago was a political masterpiece. Yes, the Republican brand was in the toilet; the economy had cratered; his real opponent, George Bush, was a political pariah; and the country despaired for a new direction. Still, we recall the Obama campaign as a crushing force, brilliantly harnessed, riding the tide of history.
When Facebook's 27-year-old CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, wore a hoodie at a presentation to investors during the lead-up to Facebook's initial public offering, a financial analyst publicly accused Zuckerberg of immaturity. By dressing casually at such an important event, he alleged, Zuckerberg was telling potential shareholders they didn't matter.
Over the past weekend, Gov. Jerry Brown of California took to the safety of YouTube to reveal that the Golden State's budget deficit is now $15.7 billion, far greater than the original $9.2 billion estimate in January.
Nicole came to the United States from Indonesia on a temporary fiancée visa, fully expecting that she would enjoy life in a new country with the U.S. citizen she intended to marry. Instead, she found herself trapped as a victim of sex trafficking.
It's the diplomatic equivalent of hosting both the World Cup and the World Series in the same country on the same weekend.
Facebook advocates are touting the company's initial public offering this week -- the biggest ever for an Internet company-- as if it will save the net, the economy and the American way. Its detractors see the final chapter in the rise and fall of a smart but solipsistic Harvard dropout, and predict the inevitable decline of Facebook's stock will spell the end to innovation in social media. Internet Bubble 2.0.
North Carolina is so important to the re-election chances of Barack Obama that he picked Charlotte as the host city for the Democratic nominating convention.
President Obama appeared at two recent fundraisers with some serious sticker shock.
The United States is at a strategic inflection point. The choices we make now will have an enormous effect on our national security for decades. The war in Iraq has ended, and we have begun a transition in Afghanistan that will lead to a smaller American commitment in 2014 and beyond. On the horizon, we can see the end of a decade of war.
JPMorgan Chase can be considered a systemically dangerous institution, which means that it is "too big to fail" because the government fears that its collapse would cause a global financial crisis.
© 2012 Cable News Network. Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
|