It’s hard to attribute anything

So what I want all of you to know is that we are going to

bring those who killed our fellow Americans to justice. I

want people around the world to hear me: to all those who

would do us harm, no act of terror will go unpunished. It

will not dim the light of the values that we proudly present

to the rest of the world. No act of violence shakes the

resolve of the United States of America.

Think of it as a he-said, he-said debate.

That question about Libyan security, or the lack of it, was

the only one Tuesday night that dealt with national-security

matters. “I’m happy,” Obama as he and Romney wrestled over

Libya, “to have a longer conversation about foreign policy.

”

He’ll get his wish next Monday night when the two square off

on the topic in Boca Raton, Fla. But if the tension between

the two candidates – which seemed to spike when responding

to the Libya question – is repeated during the foreign-

policy session, it could turn into yet another lengthy

engagement without a clear victor.

It’s hard to attribute anything but coincidence to the fact

that Cuban President Raúl Castro issued a major immigration

reform on Tuesday, Oct. 16, which was the 50th anniversary of

the start of the Cold War’s most harrowing moment, the Cuban

Missile Crisis. But the two things are nonetheless related.

Castro’s reform—eliminating the onerous exit visa

requirement for Cubans who want to travel outside the

communist island—is a reminder of how the missile crisis

prompted both Washington and Havana to shut down movement

into and out of Cuba for the past half century. And it’s one

more sign among many that each side needs to put that cold-

war past behind it.

michael kors watch



in one form or another

michael kors watch

This episode is likely to repeat, in one form or another, throughout the first months and even years of Medvedev's rule. If it seems as if Russia has elected a man nobody knows anything about, it's because Russia, with a complacency easily mistakable for contentedness, didn't really elect Dmitri Medvedev at all. It reelected Vladimir Putin, in the way Tibetan monks pick the same Dalai Lama each time, regardless of the human form he's taken. The rubber-stamping of the Kremlin candidate illuminates a useful truth about Russian society: Putin's stifling regime and the country's oil-fueled prosperity are viewed not as unrelated phenomena but as cause and effect. Medvedev, even as he formally represents the end of that regime, is also its ultimate triumph.NEW DELHI: With India Against Corruption's expose on BJP chief Nitin Gadkari not turning out to be as explosive as expected, the main opposition party on Wednesday heaved a sigh of relief and used the occasion to claim that it had passed the corruption test with flying colours.

Gadkari dismissed the allegations and said, "The allegations are baseless, wrong and unfortunate... I have been working in the area as a social enterprise for the benefit of farmers... The allegations of land (grabbing) are absurd. Land has been given on lease to a charitable trust which functions like a cooperative. It is not owned by me."

While trying to rubbish IAC for bringing out cases of corruption against political leaders, BJP however is fumbling on how to deal with activist Arvind Kejriwal , who is also aspiring to take the political space, as he is hitting out at all parties.

No battle footage

michael kors watch

The American government has learned, sometimes in fits and starts, to "manage" the problem of its troop casualties much as early nineteenth-century reformers learned to "manage" the punishment of social deviants: remove them from public view and institutionalize their recognition. As early as World War II, a major effort was made to keep photographs of dead and wounded American soldiers out of the media, and after televised newsreporting brought the Vietnam War "home" each night and helped to turn the American public against it, a dramatically different protocol was put in place for the first Gulf war and now for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No battle footage, bleeding soldiers, or flag-draped coffins are to be seen. Remembrances are consigned instead to the dry print and official wordings of interior newspaper pages, and assimilated to the formal occasions marking collective sacrifice: Armistice Day, Memorial Day, the Fourth of July. It was remarkable, and telling, that well- placed commentators could regard the attacks of September 11 as heralding an end of American "innocence."
Whatever "innocence" Americans could claim--forget, for the moment, the many atrocities committed against Indians and people of African descent since the time of European settlement--was surely lost much earlier, in the 1860s, in the hills, woods, villages, and cornfields of their own country. During those years Americans slaughtered each other in great numbers in what we have come to call the Civil War, and as a consequence they encountered dying and death on a scale never attained before or since. That encounter, Drew Gilpin Faust tells us in her moving, disturbing, suggestive, and elegant book, would not only shock, but also transform, Americans and their nation in ways that resonate to this day.