This photo makes me laugh so much. It ran on the front page of the NY Times, and shows Specialist Zachary Boyd of Fort Worth, TX fighting in Afghanistan in his pink boxers. He had been sleeping when the compound he was in was attacked, and he ran out to help fight in [...]

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I love looking at NY Times photos. They have a certain sophistication, a sense of subtlety that is matched by few other publications. It’s a testament, not only to their photographers but also to their photo editors. That is the kind of photography I would like to see myself doing in the [...]

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A three-year-old boy called Adolf Hitler Campbell has been refused a birthday cake with his name on it by a New Jersey supermarket.
Heath Campbell, 35, and his wife, Deborah, 25, say they are upset at the decision made by their local ShopRite not to write “Happy Birthday Adolf Hitler” across the cake, and that people [...]

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A group of college students raises $250,000 for Darfur and looks for an appropriate and impactful way to spend it.
Bell and Hanis’s aborted foray into the world of discount drone shopping was done on behalf of the Genocide Intervention Network (GI-Net). Founded at Swarthmore in October 2004 by Hanis and another student, Andrew Sniderman, GI-Net [...]

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“I have never been considered a part of the religious right, because I don’t believe politics is the most effective way to change the world,” he says now. “Although public service can be a noble profession, and I believe it is our responsibility to vote, I don’t have much faith in government solutions, given the [...]

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My children believe in heroes. I want heroes too, but real life gets in the way. How can I watch China’s Olympic divers without recalling the reports that some are competing with injuries, sacrificing themselves for national pride, and a chance at an apartment? How can I watch the runners’ rippling bodies without remembering Marion [...]

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Enter Erik Prince, the chairman and CEO of Blackwater Worldwide. Yes, that Blackwater. Most of the attention the company has attracted has been for its security work in protecting U.S. diplomats in Iraq. But much more of their work is training: from border and narcotics police in Afghanistan to police and maritime forces in countries [...]

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Ever since I returned to the United States in 2004 from my last posting to China, as this newspaper’s Beijing bureau chief, I’ve been struck by the breathless way we talk about that country. So often, our perceptions of the place have more to do with how we look at ourselves than with what’s actually [...]

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So I have this fantasy: Suppose that the United States focused less on blowing things up in Pakistan’s tribal areas and more on working through local aid groups to build schools, simultaneously cutting tariffs on Pakistani and Afghan manufactured exports. There would be no immediate payback, but a better-educated and more economically vibrant Pakistan would [...]

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WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS PROFANITY. IF YOU ARE BOTHERED BY PROFANITY, PLEASE DON’T READ IT.
So there’s this mini-saga going on across the pond from us. Apparently a writer for the Guardian The Times (thank you for the correction Mr. Commenter) didn’t appreciate it too much when his sub-editor removed a very important “a” [...]

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Our primary ideological export should not be fear; it should be hope. We are at war with people and their belief systems, and ideas cannot be killed by bullets. They can only be killed by better ideas.
Without a coherent strategy, America’s “war on terror” has been tragically inconsistent. We say that our mandate is to [...]

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Yes, the underbelly of journalism involves chasing politicians out of seedy hotels in the dark of night, taping conversations and nosing through quasi-personal records, but it should most definitely not involve stealing personal appeals to higher powers.
Yep, while Obama was at the Western Wall, he left a prayer, as is the tradition. Someone [...]

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Although I lived and worked in New York City, this woman–I’ll call her Heather–was one of the few Americans I interacted with during the course of a typical workday. While in law school, I had applied for an internship at the Israeli U.N. Mission. Instead, despite not even being Israeli, I was offered a full-time [...]

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If you had a spare $10 billion over the next four years, how would you spend it to achieve the most for humanity?
This is a small amount compared to rich-government budgets. But if we could set aside an extra $10 billion, we could achieve an awful lot.
Would you spend your money tackling diseases like malaria, [...]

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And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.
The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of [...]

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