Boston Globe

"'The biggest surprise was that 76 percent of people who had a medical-related bankruptcy had health insurance when they first got sick,' said Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, a doctor at Cambridge Hospital and one of the authors. 'That's really new. No one has asked that before.'" [more]

"'Our daughter is adopted. Her DNA is different,'" Deirdre Sassaman said. 'We wouldn't have a sample without this program.'" [more]

"Some exercises Kerry could try, according to Peabody, are to imagine he is talking in a church, then imagine he is talking to someone over the noise of a subway car, then to an audience of children, then to an ailing patient. Kerry should also do breathing exercises to "uncover parts of the voice that may be unfamiliar or covered by habit," Roth said. In giving a speech, she added, he needs to be willing to go "off the page" in the manner of Clinton or Martin Luther King Jr., adjusting to the audience." [more]

"Under a preliminary plan floated by convention organizers, the 'free-speech zone' would be a small plot bounded by Green Line tracks and North Washington Street, in an area that until recently was given over to the elevated artery. The zone would hold as few as 400 of the several thousand protesters who are expected in Boston in late July." [more]

"The Bl(A)ck Tea Society plans no marches or rallies, although it hopes to arrange an open-air concert and an 'alternative village' that would disseminate information on politics and current issues. Members dismissed the stereotype of unruly activists running around breaking windows or creating havoc — although they acknowledged that a little street theater or traffic disruption would not hurt." [more]

"Republicans used to be the party that opposed social engineering, but now they push programs to outlaw marriage for some people, and encourage it for others." [more]

" 'There appears to have been no hacking, no stealing, and no violation of any Senate rule,' Miranda said. 'Stealing assumes a property right and there is no property right to a government document ... These documents are not covered under the Senate disclosure rule because they are not official business and, to the extent they were disclosed, they were disclosed inadvertently by negligent [Democratic] staff.' " [more]

"The Carnegie study, based on five months of interviews and research that compared statements by US officials with declassified documents, said that the Bush administration ignored experts who could have offered more accurate information and swept aside the assessments of the State and Energy departments, whose different findings were not made public until July, months after the invasion." [more]

" 'Almost two years after the fall of the Taliban and nearly six months after the fall of Baghdad, the White House is finally organizing itself to deal with the realities of postwar Afghanistan and Iraq," said Senator John Edwards. '[R]earranging flow charts is no substitute for leadership.' " [more]

"Senior administration officials for the first time acknowledged that they vastly underestimated the damage to [Iraq's] infrastructure and greatly overestimated the amount of oil revenue that could be used to help rebuild the war-torn country. The disclosures ... mark the administration's strongest acknowledgment to date that it failed to fully comprehend the complexities of rebuilding Iraq." [more]

"The CIA's March report concluded that Iraqi society and history showed little evidence to support the creation of democratic institutions, going so far as to say its prospects for democracy could be 'impossible,' according to intelligence officials who have seen it. The assessment was based on Iraq's history of repression and war; clan, tribal and religious conflict; and its lack of experience as a viable country prior to its arbitrary creation as a monarchy by British colonialists after World War I." [more]

"Two American soldiers were killed yesterday in northern Iraq and thousands of Shi'ites protested angrily, as hostility toward the US presence in Iraq jumped religious and regional boundaries, expanding far beyond Saddam Hussein's loyalist base." [more]

"[A] soldier's death raised the number of combat fatalities in the Iraq war to 146, one shy of the combat death toll of US soldiers in the 1991 Gulf War." [more]

"After resigning [as a US diplomat in Greece], I came to see myself as the canary in the mine shaft, the squeamish soul that keeled over first when our policy became toxic. [The Greeks'] view is that of the majority of the Muslim world: The United States put itself into the ranks of evil by failing to impose the just peace in the Middle East its power allegedly permitted it." [more]

"Tens of thousands of people from across New England and beyond converged on a damp, windswept Boston Common for a massive antiwar rally yesterday, then marched through the city, saying they hoped to show the world that not all Americans support President Bush and the war in Iraq." [more]

"Some combat troops privately admitted feeling sidelined in a country where only weak pockets of enemy forces remain after 17 months of US and allied operations to root out Al Qaeda." [more]

"No one doubts that an Iraq conflict will hurt the area's economy, what's unclear is how much and for how long." [more]

"Demonstrators said they are anxious that time is running out to stop an attack on Iraq, but they said they hoped the massive rallies coming on the heels of a rebuff of the US position at the United Nations on Friday will make things particularly uncomfortable for the Bush administration." [more]

"No war can be successfully waged if it lacks the strong support of the American people. Before pulling the trigger on war, the administration must tell the American people the full story about Iraq. So far, it has not." [more]

"[The author] still can't believe his strip, made for a few friends as catharsis for his unease in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks and the onset of the war in Afghanistan, has resonated with so many people." [more]

"The arrests of hundreds of men who were trying to comply with an Immigration and Naturalization Service edict have underscored problems with a program aimed at tracking visitors from countries that have been used as bases for terrorism." [more]

"Dramatic confrontations in Iran between hard-liners and reformers, suggesting that the Islamic Republic may be tottering, recall the lesson history taught Mikhail Gorbachev: A political system rooted in lies and repression cannot long survive the telling of truth that comes with free speech." [more]

"In a sign of growing opposition in the academic world to potential war with Iraq, more than 1,000 students and professors at local colleges spoke out yesterday at rallies, panels, and marches, vowing to step up opposition to a preemptive strike against Iraq." [more]

"Again daring to go where few of his colleagues venture, Kennedy defined all of this by its proper name: 'The administration's doctrine is a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other nation can or should accept.' The debate in Congress this week is centered on Saddam Hussein and Iraq, but what is really at stake are basic structures of the American idea." [more]

"The situation involving Coleman and Wellstone is similar. The obvious judgment of the Coleman campaign is that Minnesota's electorate is interested above all in supporting Bush on the impending war with no ifs or questions." [more]

"So far the Bush administration's foreign policy team has manifested all the symptoms of groupthink that Janis identified." [more]

"For leftists like me who had long considered Chomsky as our own beacon of moral clarity, it is hard to say which development is more catastrophic: the fact that Chomsky-bashing has become a major political pastime, or the fact that Chomsky has become so very difficult to defend." [more]

" 'The goal is not just a new regime in Iraq. The goal is a new Middle East,' said Raad Alkadiri, an Iraq analyst with PFC, a Washington-based energy consulting organization. 'The goal has been and remains one of the main driving factors of preemptive action against Iraq.' " [more]

"While the government has been using satellite technology for more than 40 years, it has begun to delegate certain tasks to the growing commercial satellite industry to save government satellites for more precise and classified work. The commercial industry can provide a ''big picture'' context in which to place the more-detailed images from government satellites." [more]

"This is the first time such charges have been made by a senior military man with pro-settler associations ó factors that make the charges difficult for the settlers and their supporters to brush aside." [more]

"If Ashcroft wishes to assess the likely effect of the snooping regime he is about to implement, he could ask postal workers from the old days in Prague to explain what happens to a society's sense of solidarity when everybody on the block assumes that the mailman is telling the secret police that Comrade X has been reading bourgeois books." [more]

"With folks at the summit such as Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe, who stole his last election, and Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy, who refuses to hold an election, the question is: How real can this be?" [more]

"Like their Muslim extremist counterparts, Hindu nationalists seek to expel Western secularism from their midst, persecuting non-Hindus, trashing hotels that celebrate Valentine's Day or Christmas, and demanding that cities with Islamic names, such as Allahabad, be changed. Other religions — and there are more Muslims in India than there are in Pakistan — are considered offshoots of a basic Hindu entity that should submit to Hindutva." [more]

[Graphic:] "If approved by Congress, the Homeland Security office would draw from the budgets and jurisdictions of eight existing Cabinet departments or Cabinet-level agencies and involve nearly 170,000 federal employees and a budget of $37 billion." [more]

"The new aid for Colombia, being considered on Capitol Hill, would for the first time allow the US military to help and train forces in the battle against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the largest Colombian guerrilla group, which controls about 40 percent of the country. US law has limited American assistance to the Colombian government to fight the drug trade." [more]

"An awful question hovers over these accounts of torturers who come to America to hide from justice. How can it be that the United States makes so little effort to identify, prosecute, or extradite foreign torturers living here?" [more]

"The CIA and State Department have begun aggressively courting exiled Iraqi generals in Europe and the United States whom they see as key to overthrowing President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, US officials and Iraqi dissidents said." [more]

"Legal specialists have mixed opinions on what use, if any, the tape would have in a criminal prosecution of bin Laden or other members of the terrorist group Al Qaeda that he is believed to lead." [more]

In contrast to the post-WWII trials, "the Bush-drafted proceedings will be secret, bypassing or brushing aside the rules of evidence so scrupulously observed at Nuremberg. The judges will be military officers, answerable to superiors and dependent on them for promotion and career advancement. Defendants can even be barred from seeing evidence against them, have no right of appeal, and can be put to death by a two-thirds vote of the tribunal, rather than the unanimous vote required by the rules of courts-martial." [more]