The United States is changing and the Democratic liberals might be able (just) to win a national election without the overwhelming support of the alienated white working class. If such a victory doesn’t happen this time, it will soon. The US, like Britain, is seeing the rise of what one might call a mass chattering class.
Data is increasingly flowing around the United States, which may have intelligence — and conceivably military — consequences. Some Internet technologists and privacy advocates say that the actions of US intelligence agencies and other government policies may be hastening the shift toward Canada and Europe.
In tones that seemed alternately angry and mischievous, the Russian Prime Minister suggested that the Bush administration may have tried to create a crisis that would influence American voters in the choice of a successor to President Bush.
After the end of the Cold War, the United States could have done so much to continue the advance to an even more effective, rules-based system where law governed relations between states. Instead, today’s America has pushed these high aspirations and noble principles aside and led us, step by step, to a point of crisis. What went wrong?
George W. Bush’s remark in 2000 that America “stands alone right now in the world in terms of power” no longer rings true. Great shifts are apparent in global politics and Washington must increasingly compete for favour. This global uncertainty confronts senators Barack Obama and John McCain in their race for the White House.
A new study published in July’s Journal of Experimental Social Psychology claims that participants could guess fairly accurately (”better than chance”) whether men were gay or straight by looking at photos of their faces. The photos used in the study were taken from Internet personal ads and from Facebook, and then examined by 15 undergraduate students.
James Robinson is a retired Air National Guard brigadier general who is certified by the Transportation Security Administration to carry a weapon into the cockpit as part of the government’s defense program. But there’s one problem: Robinson has difficulty even getting on a plane because his name is on the government’s terrorist “watch list.”
NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer accused Russia of failing to respect a French-brokered peace plan requiring both sides to move troops back to their positions before Georgia launched an offensive on the separatist region of South Ossetia. This “is not happening at the moment,” the NATO chief said at an emergency meeting of foreign ministers in Brussels today.
Among the findings of the survey: 69 per cent surveyed said the United States should shift its forces from Iraq to Afghanistan and the Gulf region, with 80 per cent believing that the United States has focused too much on Iraq and not enough on Afghanistan.
Is Russia a threat — to its neighbors, to Europe, to the United States? What are the United States and its NATO allies prepared to do if Russia blackmails or attacks another sovereign democratic nation that is not a member of the alliance? Should the West continue to engage Russia or focus more on containing its ambitions?