News & Features

Mitt Romney made his first attempts to gain critical support from Latino voters this month, but failed to confront his own negative record on issues of high priority to Latino voters. During a primary race stop in New Hampshire Jan. 9, he spoke of the need to "convince more Latino Americans to vote Republican" if the GOP wants to be competitive in November against the Democrats and Barack Obama, who is already campaigning for re-election.

Once in a while tigers make international news, like the white tiger in Las Vegas that mauled illusionist Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy, or the one that killed a teenager at the San Francisco Zoo. Most of the time, though, the news is about tigers being eaten by man. The latest involves a restaurateur in Hanoi arrested for selling tiger meat. She has been arrested before and served time in jail, but the trade proves too lucrative – $1,000 per 100 grams of tiger meat -- to give up, especially now that there are but a few tigers left in the wild. 

To anyone who grew up in the Cold War, the rhetoric of the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential candidates is strangely familiar. The United States, they warn, is threatened by an alien ideology. What’s startling is that the bogeyman this time around is not resurgent and increasingly hostile Russia, but Western Europe – Washington’s closest and most steadfast ally since the end of World War II.

Ever since the colonial riot of 1776, upper caste Britons have enjoyed imagining us Yanks as poorly educated, uncouth, and badly tailored speakers of preposterously accented English. Since Eisenhower won World War II, our comeback was simple enough: What of it, you buck-toothed bunch of post-imperial toffee snouts? We’ve got money, movies, jazz and practically all the big guns. 

A long and tortuous road it has certainly been for the "Newt 2012" campaign for the Republican nomination. But the former Speaker of the House has proven a renegade in both political form and function, blazing a campaign trail every bit as erratic and full of gambits as his politics and incendiary rhetoric. 

It’s full-tilt political boogie in the United States and Mexico. Media in both nations are saturated with interviews, profiles and satires of the candidates. Cable blasts virtually nonstop news of the Republican primaries and the ones for president and Mexico City mayor south of the border. In 2012 the neighboring countries will experience national, local and state elections in extraordinary times. In the year 2000, the last time major U.S. and Mexican elections coincided, the results led to jarring and even unimaginable events in both countries.

In his January 9 New York Times  column, “Where Are the Liberals?”  conservative commentator David Brooks chides the venality of Democrats, as well as Republicans, for “perpetually soiling the name of government for the sake of short-term gain.” In his presumptively even-handed tone, Brooks declares that is corrupted by “renters,” special interests who have mired America’s leaders in conflicts of interest. And who are the renters? Along with Wall Street—you know, the 1 percent most of us think of as the owners, not the renter--Brooks pillories old people.

While a majority of Mississippi voters approved a bill last November to show a government-issued photo ID before casting a ballot, more than 75 percent of the state’s minority population voted to reject the measure, according to a new study by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights (LCCR). The study, released this week, shows that voter preferences for the bill, which amends the state constitution, are polarized along racial lines.