Word: americanize
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Sacco's project leaves many Gazans dumbfounded, sometimes even angry: 1956 was a long time ago, they keep telling the American author, as Israeli choppers fire cannons at fleeing militants and bulldozers tear down Palestinian homes deemed too close to Israeli positions. Why not write about the here and now? But Sacco is as dogged as a noir detective; he never gives up after being told by an Islamic militant that one of the massacres, in Khan Younis, had "left a wound in my heart that can never heal... (They) planted hatred in our hearts." (See pictures of heartbreak...
...There is, perhaps, another factor as well. Instead of coming up through Harlem's political machine, the newest batch of African-American leaders - stars such as Obama, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Alabama Representative Artur Davis, Rangel's colleague on Ways and Means - have risen through the traditional channels of the U.S. meritocracy, says David Bositis, an expert on black electoral politics at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. "These guys are Ivy league, corporate-law-firm types," Bositis says. "You're talking about a very different political system than what Basil Paterson, Dinkins and guys...
...living, with massive capital inflows propping up its currency (the Swiss franc), making imported goods relatively cheaper. That's why maintaining bank secrecy has effectively been national policy for decades. As a Senate investigator, Blum got a taste of that when he tried to question a European representative for American companies in Switzerland who was suspected of commercial bribery. "I was personally warned by the Swiss ambassador that if I tried to talk with anyone about money hidden in Switzerland I'd be arrested," he recalled. "People understood that's where the hot money went...
Over the years, the Swiss government has also skillfully doled out intelligence dollops to its American counterparts to keep the U.S. government from pressing too much. That may have been one reason recently retired Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, who had butted against Swiss bank secrecy repeatedly since the 1960s, was not able to make many cases. The federal government is more earnest than ever, he says, but the resolve comes when the locus of tax evasion has already shifted to other havens. "Switzerland is not the No. 1 problem any more. The Caymans is the biggest problem," he says...
...Historians will debate the causes of Iraq's vicious outpouring of sectarian violence after the American invasion in 2003 - was it a reaction to the suppression of religious identity under Saddam Hussein or an extension of the policies of American administrators who found it easiest to deal with Iraqis through a crude sectarian and ethnic prism? Whatever the cause, the sectarian leaders who prevailed in the elections enabled by the U.S. proved incapable of peacefully resolving their differences, which were instead settled in the streets. But as Iraq's fragile new democracy matures, its ever divisive identity politics are becoming...