Shorts (left)
Students in this tiny town of grain silos and ranch-style houses spent much of the first couple of days in school this week trying to guess which of their teachers were carrying pistols under their clothes.
Scorning Bush, Obama Takes Aim at McCain
Sen. Barack Obama accepted the Democratic Party presidential nomination on Thursday, declaring that the “American promise has been threatened” by eight years under President Bush and that Sen. John McCain represented a continuation of policies that undermined the nation’s economy and imperiled its standing around the world.
Shorts (right)
The cable industry, aiming to prevent Internet companies like Yahoo and YouTube from snatching away its ad revenue, has introduced an experimental political channel that gives advertisers a uniform way to buy time and measure the number of people watching.
Fannie Mae Workers Watch As Stock Plans Dwindle
Fannie Mae’s workers had $116 million in the employee stock ownership plan at the end of 2006. Today, it’s more like $17.5 million.
Unlike Years Past, DNC Transformed Into High-Profile Spectacle
For the first time in memory, a spectator at a presidential nomination acceptance speech was treated for sunstroke. Fireworks replaced the traditional balloon drop, sunlight supplanted klieg lights. Parents brought children from as far away as Africa, and delegates munched Bronco Brats and clicked cell phone pictures of a political carnival that bore no resemblance to any convention finale that had come before.
U.S. and Bolivia Spar as Partners in Drug War
The refrain here in the Chapare jungle about Americans is short but powerful: “Long Live Coca, Death to the Yanquis!”
Tropic Thunder
Tropical cyclone activity in the Atlantic basin has recently surged. Tropical Storm Hanna formed yesterday northeast of the Bahamas and will possibly threaten the east coast of the U.S. sometime late next week. However, the main story is Tropical Storm Gustav, which made landfall in Haiti and Jamaica over the past few days and threatens to move into the Gulf of Mexico by the weekend. Oil companies have begun to evacuate some personnel, as the storm will likely impact the Gulf states early next week. The future intensities and exact paths of these storms are still highly uncertain, but they bear close monitoring.
Defiant Envoy to NATO Gives Voice to New Russia
Here is one measure of the aggressive shift in Russian foreign policy in recent days: Dmitri O. Rogozin, Russia’s representative to NATO, a finger-wagging nationalist who hung a poster of Stalin in his new ambassadorial office, is not sounding so extreme any more.
U.S. to Transfer Security Duties In Anbar Province to Iraqis
The American military will hand over responsibility for the security of Anbar province, once a stronghold of the Sunni insurgency and one of the most violent regions in Iraq, to the Iraqi government as early as Monday, Iraqi and American officials said Wednesday.
As Raw Materials Costs Increase, Job Site Thefts Rise Nationwide
Sue Wentz and her husband, Eugene, saved for five years, living in a modest home in a low-income neighborhood of Houston, before they broke ground in January on a 4,300-square-foot house on 12 acres in Magnolia, Texas, a woodsy suburb about 40 miles northwest of the city. They are overseeing the construction themselves to control costs. So it was with dismay that they arrived at the job site one morning in July to find that all the copper wiring and air-conditioning tubing had been ripped out of the rough frame of the house.
Shorts (left)
Orders for durable goods, a report that is considered an indicator of future manufacturing activity, topped analysts’ predictions in July and recorded its third consecutive monthly increase.
Shorts (right)
Officials trying to prop up the sagging economy here are convinced they have found a remedy: annexing a piece of Red Sox Nation.
Obama Secures Democratic Presidential Nomination
When Sen. Barack Obama announced in early July that he would give his nomination address in an outdoor stadium in front of 75,000 people, he wowed members of both parties who saw it as an inspired stroke of campaign image making.
McCain Set to Announce Running Mate on Friday
Sen. John McCain has decided on his running mate, two Republican strategists in contact with McCain’s campaign said Wednesday. He is expected to reveal his choice at a rally at a basketball arena in Dayton, Ohio, at 11 a.m. on Friday.
Still Sunny and Dry
As the summer comes to an end, we are still enjoying a rare sight for this season: sunny and dry days. The rest of the summer was in contrast very wet and stormy. July is climatologically the driest month of the year in Boston with a normal total of about 3.06 in (78 mm). This year the accumulated rain during July was 6.00 in (152 mm) with a total of 17 days with rain making it the 6th wettest July since 1872. June and August so far have also been wetter than normal. The total seasonal rainfall (13.9 in) is far from record breaking (24.89 inches in 1955) but it is still remarkable, making it at least within the 15 percent of the rainiest summers in Boston.
Markets React to Russia’s Recognition of Separatists
The effects of Russia’s first foreign war as a capitalist country rippled Tuesday through the Moscow stock markets, which dipped to their lowest level since 2006. The loss of billions of dollars in paper value is confronting the Kremlin with a dimension to its geopolitical posturing that never existed during the Cold War, even as Russia seemed to be consolidating its gains after the Georgia conflict.
Taliban Victory Underscores Weakness of Afghan Forces
The Taliban bomber calmly parked a white fuel tanker near the prison gates of this city one evening in June, then jumped down from the cab and let out a laugh. Prison guards fired on the bomber as he ran off, but they missed, instead killing the son of a local shopkeeper, who watched the scene unfold from across the street.
North Korea Threatens to Reactivate Nuclear Facilities
North Korea said Tuesday that it had stopped disabling its main nuclear complex, and threatened to restore facilities there that the North has used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons unless the United States removed it from a terrorist list.
Increase in Government Health Plans Helped Turn Tide in 2007
After climbing steadily for six years, the number of Americans without health insurance dropped by more than a million in 2007, to 45.7 million, the Census Bureau reported Tuesday.
Kennedy Left Hospital Bed to Give Talk at Convention
Sen. Edward M. Kennedy had just left a hospital bed here when he delivered his speech to the Democratic National Convention on Monday night, after suffering a debilitating bout of kidney stones on Sunday upon arriving in town, aides said.