News & Features

Images, and the words that oftentimes accompany them, have a tendency to take on lives of their own.  The mustache sported so famously by Hitler represents many things.  It represents fear, violence, extermination, destruction, hate.  The very fact that someone would use an image as loaded as that of Hitler to make a statement about an economic policy is irresponsible.  That being said, the policies born from economic theories have had huge impacts on the lives of millions upon millions of people.  

Indian Americans and other South Asian Americans are being predominantly targeted by scam artists pretending to be Internal Revenue Service officials who threaten to send out an arrest warrant if money is not paid to them immediately over the phone, the Federal Trade Commission reported in a bulletin released Mar. 21. J. Russell George, Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration, also issued a warning to consumers the same day, indicating that more than 20,000 people have been victimized by this scam and have paid out over $1 million.

Under the healthcare law, those who do not obtain coverage for 2014 face financial penalties of up to 1 percent of their yearly household income, or $95 a person, whichever amount is higher, although even before the deadline extension was announced, there was an array of exemptions for hardships and other reasons. While most Americans know that the law includes fines for those who do not buy coverage, Kaiser found that just 39 percent of the uninsured were aware of the Monday deadline. 

For quite a while it has become a foregone conclusion to many that Hillary Clinton is Barack Obama’s natural successor and the inevitable Democratic nominee in 2016. Although she was also seen as the frontrunner in the lead up to the 2008 election the sentiment was no means as widespread as it is today.Her 2002 vote in favor of authorizing the disastrous Iraq War was fresh in the minds of many Democrats and ultimately was probably the deciding factor in the hotly contested primary against Obama. These days, however, that vote is a distant memory.  

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, an agency charged by Congress with monitoring liberty of conscience around the world, has just issued a report on prosecutions for blasphemy in other countries. Predictably, the leading offenders are Muslim countries, such as Egypt, Iran, Bangladesh, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. Pakistan is cited as “the most egregious example … where blasphemy charges are common and numerous individuals are in prison, with a high number sentenced to death or life terms.”

We expect tragedy, whether its man-made or natural, to come fully illustrated - collapsed buildings, mangled limbs, charred bogies of trains, airplanes crashing into skyscrapers in front of our horrified eyes. Flight MH370 has none of that. Days after the tragedy we heard about a "yellow object" floating in the sea. Perhaps an oil slick. But all we have seen on 24-hour television is the footage of anxious families huddled in Beijing airport, glued to cellphones.

Moves to separate Crimea from Ukraine do not meet that standard. The rest of Ukraine has not given its consent to transferring Crimea to Russian sovereignty. Hence Russia’s humiliating defeat in the UN Security Council on 16 March. Not one Security Council member voted on Russia’s side. No state wants to see new precedents that call into question its own control of its own territory.President Putin’s bluntly (or brazenly) opened by asserting that international law was on his side.

In order for California’s new Common Core education standards to succeed, districts and the state must address the needs of these students. Common Core is a new set of standards in English language arts and mathematics designed to assess and instruct students, placing greater emphasis on critical thinking and analysis. Instruction is to be more interactive and project-based. Textbooks will have less of an emphasis on rote exercises and more on abstract reasoning.