| Cubans eye U.S. presidential election
Quiz Cubans on their new president and you're as likely to hear about Hillary Rodham Clinton, John McCain and Barack Obama as Raul Castro. Many believe any changes the next American administration makes to its Cuba policy will be more important to their happiness than any reforms the island's first new head of state in 49 years may embrace. A 32-year-old named Pepe was sipping straight rum from a small plastic cup on a bench near Havana's Central Park when asked about his country's new government. "What about a new U.S. president?" he responded. "Do you really think Obama can win? Will he get rid of the blockade?" he wondered, referring to the U.S. trade embargo on the island. Seated nearby, his pal predicted that undercurrents of racism and sexism would push McCain to victory in the November election.
Lessons of the Chesapeake Sweep
It was a failure of leadership and imagination in Washington – the culmination of decades of decisions that were made or put off without regard to the realities of a global economy and the growing inequality it's produced. It's a Washington where George Bush hands out billions in tax cuts year after year to the biggest corporations and the wealthiest few who don't need them and don't ask for them – tax breaks that are mortgaging our children's future on a mountain of debt; tax breaks that could've gone into the pockets of the working families who needed them most. It's a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who've seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear; workers whose right to organize and unionize has been under assault for the last eight years.
Letters, 11/29: The dangers of MySpace
This article is just one of the many horror stories I have heard about the site. Not only are there people — adults and children — making "false pages," there are predators, and without truly knowing the person you don’t know who it might be. .
Lundekvam fighting to save career
Thanks Claus but time for new blood. What's so annoying is, they knew about Claus and Svensson for ages yet did nothing - we'd probably not be in this state if we draughted in suitable replacements. They can't claim it was a surprise! Good foresight Saints, as usual! IDIOTS!! .
Kate Jones: Literary agent with flawless taste
Kate Jones was one of the most brilliant literary agents of her generation, and leaves behind an extraordinary list of devoted authors. At the time of her death, at the age of 46, she was at the peak of her powers and changing the character of agenting in London – by sheer force and warmth of her personality. Traditionally, literary agents are the invisible partners in the unholy publishing triangle of author, agent and publisher. They negotiate "the deal" – the huge, life-transforming advances that have all too often enriched authors in the short-term, impoverished publishers, and left both sides worse off in the long term before walking away to leave the author and the publisher to getting on as best they can. Not Kate Jones. She was a brilliant deal-maker, with more than her fair share of the Holy Grail of authors: "the big six-figure advance".
It's the metaphysics, stupid
As Obama points out often, this is a particularly American perspective. When the Founders wrote "We hold these truths to be self-evident," they were not only not self-evident; they weren't even true. Americans have gone a long way toward making them true because we've shown, time and again, that despite slavery and sexism and economic inequality, we believe they should be true. If it's a message so catchy that it has now made the rounds of cyberspace as a star-studded video, it's also one with roots as deep as Immanuel Kant. The "Critique of Pure Reason" is not easy reading, but it makes some startling claims. Kant tells us that Plato's ideal of a perfectly just state was always dismissed as a utopian dream; but if everyone had worked to realize those ideals, they would be true today.
All things to all men
In assimilating their love of 60s pop and psychedelia into the high-velocity fury of hardcore, Hüsker Dü scorched the earth upon which both the Pixies and Nirvana would subsequently build the foundations for the alternative nation. Besides, Mould's eviscerating songs of anger and pain eschewed gender specifics. Hüsker Dü's 1984 double album Zen Arcade is so overwhelming a treatise in existential trauma that the sexual orientation of Mould - and indeed Grant Hart, Hüsker Dü's drummer and co-songwriter, also prodigiously talented, also gay - was no more an obvious factor in that trauma than anything else. "There's a hell of a lot of confusion on those records," says Mould. "It's not like I was a fully realised gay man. At 23, living in a country that's marginalising me already because of a disease and telling me I didn't deserve to exist - that's a lot of stuff to deal with.
LOVE TIES PRINCESS TO BRITAIN
And far from discouraging their daughter from altering her plans, Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah could not be more pleased about her increasing bond with Clark, 26, who is a St Andrews University friend of Prince William.
Indeed, the Duchess of York invited David to join her, Beatrice and Eugenie skiing in Verbier, where they are staying at the luxurious chalet of Fergies old boyfriend, motor-racing multi-millionaire Paddy McNally.
Its now Beatrices view that she has already done quite enough travelling after leaving St Georges School in Ascot last summer she went to Brazil and to Argentina, where she stayed on the ranch inherited by the Duchess of York from her late mother Susan Barrantes.
She popped back to the UK to appear in Martin Scorseses film about her ancestor Queen Victoria, and then again for the Queens diamond wedding celebrations.
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