Politics
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Jackie Calmes: That scowl. The gag order. Frightened jurors. Who's on trial, a former president or a mob boss?
Donald Trump has fussed about many things during his criminal trial in Manhattan: the judge, prosecutors, their relatives, witnesses, jurors and of course the media, for reporting on the sparse crowds outside.
Yet Trump of all people knows that his fellow New Yorkers are proudly blasé about celebrity goings-on. It shouldn't be surprising that ...Read more
Stephen L. Carter: Will Columbia protesters achieve their goals?
I fear that the current round of campus protests is wearing out its welcome. This isn’t a conclusion I reach lightly. In my increasingly distant youth, I was a sometime protester myself, marching and chanting alongside classmates, and I tend to take vicarious pleasure in student activism. But in my day, we recognized the moment to stop. ...Read more
Commentary: USC's 'security risk' rationale to thwart peaceful protest is not justified
During Vietnam War protests, the Nixon administration called them “outside agitators.” Now my university’s provost prefers “participants — many of whom do not appear to be affiliated with USC.” Beyond Andrew Guzman’s misdemeanor of wordiness, the playbook is the same: Blame outsiders, as part of the justification for police action ...Read more
LZ Granderson: Arizona's indictment of Trump allies follows a sordid, racist history
I've lived and/or worked in 10 states scattered across the country. Arizona was and remains the most complicated. The same state that elected the first openly gay mayor of a large U.S. city is also the state that did not want a federal holiday for Martin Luther King Jr.
Perhaps the cultural pendulum swings so drastically because the population ...Read more
Commentary: America's 'big glass' dominance hangs on the fate of two powerful new telescopes
More than 100 years ago, astronomer George Ellery Hale brought our two Pasadena institutions together to build what was then the largest optical telescope in the world. The Mount Wilson Observatory changed the conception of humankind’s place in the universe and revealed the mysteries of the heavens to generations of citizens and scientists ...Read more
Commentary: Multigenerational households are key to better support for kids of single mothers
Decades of research show that on average, children who grow up with parents who are not married and living together have worse achievement and behavioral and well-being outcomes than children of two-parent homes. Despite this evidence, rates of nonmarital childbearing have risen dramatically in the U.S., especially among the noncollege-educated....Read more
Commentary: What the US can learn from Indiana's high school redesign
Across the country, most high school classrooms still resemble their 20th century counterparts despite massive changes in the workforce over the past 50 years.
Today’s jobs require advanced skills and education or training, yet many graduates feel unprepared for their next steps.
A 2022 YouScience survey found three-fourths of high school ...Read more
Martin Schram: A Supreme re-think
Things have gotten horribly crowded here in America’s virtual ERs.
As always, doctors in white coats and nurses in light blue scrubs are urgently applying their expertise to help – sometimes even save – patients, who include desperate pregnant women who arrived at their hospital emergency rooms suffering life and death emergencies.
But ...Read more
Mark Gongloff: No, having kids right now doesn't make you a 'moron'
In the fictional world of the P.D. James novel "Children of Men" and its movie adaptation, humanity has lost the ability to reproduce and thus faces certain extinction. We are meant to understand this as a bad thing. But there is a subset of people who would consider it a utopia. To them, Earth is doomed as long as it’s infested with humans.
...Read more
Trudy Rubin: In Europe, they cheer passage of Ukraine aid but worry about possible Trump future
BRUSSELS — On April 19, I watched an audience of European and American political officials and strategic experts pay rapt attention as U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy told them Congress would enact a Ukraine aid package that weekend. Minutes later, the attendees at the German Marshall Fund's Brussels Forum broke into cheers at the news that the House ...Read more
Editorial: A middle ground in the Trump immunity case
Donald Trump has made sweeping claims of presidential immunity in an effort to fend off two criminal prosecutions by special prosecutor Jack Smith. Smith, on the other hand, contends that the office of the presidency imports no special protection from the reach of the law.
There are problems with both arguments. No president can be above the ...Read more
Editorial: Immune to logic: Donald Trump's nonsensical argument before the Supreme Court
Thursday, the American public witnessed — or heard, rather, given the Supreme Court’s stubborn refusal to allow cameras in its courtroom — a bewildering moment. We heard as the lawyer for a former president of the United States argued before our nation’s highest court that the president is effectively a king, above the law unless his ...Read more
Editorial: In killing this bill, California Democrats proved they're lap dogs for Gov. Newsom
California Democrats are demonstrating that they view Sacramento as their own little club, where duly-elected Republicans have no power. This malignant feature of California’s one-party state results in a legislature that seems to us like a mere puppet of the Governor.
On Thursday, the state Assembly Democrats made a quick and quiet kill of a...Read more
Stephen L. Carter: The left's calls for Sonia Sotomayor to retire are absurd
The left’s absurd calls for Justice Sonia Sotomayor to step down so that President Joe Biden can name a younger replacement should be roundly condemned. To be sure, such pressure is an American tradition in the never-ending battle to “control” the Supreme Court. But the tactic is one that the justices themselves have a happy tradition of ...Read more
Marc Champion: It's time Israel put hostages over revenge in Gaza
Over 200 days into Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu needs to decide what matters more: extracting ultimate revenge on Hamas, and in the process all other Palestinians in Gaza, or getting hostages back alive.
Israel has made it clear that a major assault on Rafah, the Gaza border town in which four Hamas ...Read more
Editorial: Idaho Republican legislators wouldn't fix abortion law. It's up to the Supreme Court
Idaho’s medical community has been saying for the past two years — since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — that Idaho’s strict abortion ban is jeopardizing medical care when the health of the mother is at risk.
Idaho’s abortion laws take into account only risks to the life of the mother.
The laws are the subject of a ...Read more
Editorial: Taiwan policy must be a campaign issue
Opinion editor's note: Editorials represent the opinions of the Star Tribune Editorial Board, which operates independently from the newsroom.
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Of the four foreign policy bills that passed the U.S. House last Saturday, the most votes cast were to aid Taiwan. Unlike controversies over Ukraine and Israel, there's relative consensus on ...Read more
F.D. Flam: A century of bad choices will haunt Earth for 100,000 years
One of the many things to appreciate about our home planet is that buried in its layers of rock is a kind of time machine. These strata tell us so much about our tumultuous history of glaciers, volcanoes and asteroid impacts, as well as the plants and animals that lived, evolved and died over eons.
There’s no doubt that future geologists or ...Read more
Francis Wilkinson: Want to keep Trump from dismantling democracy? Compromise
Earlier this month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez appeared on Stephen Colbert’s television talk show and delivered an eloquent plea for U.S. government policy toward Gaza to be guided by human rights and democratic values. She warned of the potential for mass starvation in Gaza, which she termed an “unfolding genocide.” And she spoke in ...Read more
Editorial: A really bad movie: Harvey Weinstein victory at Court of Appeals is a defeat for justice
As of Thursday, under New York State law, the imprisoned rapist Harvey Weinstein serving a 23-year sentence in upstate’s Mohawk Correctional Facility, became a completely innocent man, having his conviction for sex crimes thrown out by the highest court in state, the Court of Appeals. Well, it was sort of the Court of Appeals.
In a plot more ...Read more