WASHINGTON — It’s a big story that has stayed beneath the radar of most American media. Somehow, cyber criminals stole $81 million from Bangladesh’s central bank (its Federal Reserve). The theft surely qualifies as one of the biggest cyber heists ever. It’s also a reminder that the world’s financial systems remain vulnerable to cyberattacks from […]
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Supreme Court fight is about democracy
WASHINGTON — There’s a reason, beyond garden-variety partisanship, that Senate Republicans resist even holding hearings on President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. Their gambit evades a full and open debate over the conservative judicial agenda, which is to use the high court in an aggressive and political way to reverse decades […]
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Brussels and Iraq: Battlegrounds for terrorists
The Islamist terrorists’ global war on the civilized continues unabated with Brussels, Belgium the latest target of an ISIS mass homicide. As I write this column, Belgian authorities report the coordinated terror bomb attacks on Brussels’ airport and a city metro train station killed 34 and wounded almost 200 people. This Brussels attack lacked the […]
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Garland’s nomination a political tool
Whenever I hear the words “centrist” or “moderate,” especially when they come from The New York Times and The Washington Post, the words “liberal” and “cover-up” immediately come to mind. Since President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, a confirmed conservative, the words “centrist” and “moderate” have been repeated ad nauseam. […]
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McConnell disrespectful of American public
A few words about the pious insincerity of Mitch McConnell. As you are no doubt aware, McConnell, the Senate majority leader, announced on the very day that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died that he would refuse to hold hearings on any replacement nominated by President Obama. McConnell’s “reasoning,” if you want to grace it […]
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Obama oversees new era of Cuban relations
Barack Obama walked the cobblestone streets of Old Havana to cheers of “Welcome to Cuba!” After decades of official hostility between the United States and Cuba, Obama has successfully nudged the two toward normal relations. After decades of craziness, it’s heartening to see smart policy regarding Cuba. So Cuba remains a repressive country run by […]
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Campaigns question U.S. trade policies
WASHINGTON — In this bitter campaign, one area of agreement unites the major candidates: trade. Bernie Sanders brags that he’s opposed all recent trade agreements; Hillary Clinton now rejects the Trans-Pacific Partnership, President Obama’s signature trade success that she once supported; and Donald Trump blames incompetent U.S. trade negotiators for devastating job losses to China […]
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Stopping abuse before it happens
The following editorial appeared in Sunday’s Washington Post: For two years, a federal commission has been studying the deaths of children from abuse or neglect. Traveling the country, talking to child welfare leaders and reading daily headlines about young lives lost, the commission came to a sobering realization: We accept these fatalities as inevitable. In […]
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Kemp’s more congenial politics needed today
Marco Rubio’s speech suspending his campaign after his crushing loss in the Florida primary was a requiem for an entire style of Republican politics. Rubio represented an upbeat, opportunity-oriented vein in the GOP that ran through George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism back to the late supply-sider Jack Kemp, who practically made a civic religion out […]
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In America, you can never be punished enough
We will call her Jane Doe. We really have no choice, given that that’s the only identification found in the court document. Jane is 57, a Jamaica-born permanent U.S. resident living in New York City. She is a licensed nurse and a mother. She is also a convicted felon. In 2000, Jane, trying to raise […]