Word: becker
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Economist Gary Becker and Appellate Court Judge Richard Posner are one good example of how this can happen: their blog is a widely-read source of valuable political insight. But The Daily Kos is a more interesting case: its author, Markos Zuniga, isn’t a professor or a famous judge—he’s just some guy with good ideas, and yet his site is seen by thousands and thousands of eyes every...
Other big names in the league range from contemporary stars like Andy Roddick and 2005 Wimbledon women’s singles champion Venus Williams to legendary warhorses like Boris Becker and John McEnroe...
...book is not new. Mao's womanizing, gourmandizing and peculiar personal habits?his aversion to bathing and teeth brushing, for instance?surfaced in the entertaining 1994 memoir by his physician Li Zhisui. Evidence of Mao's Machiavellian ruthlessness has been seeping out of China for years. Journalist Jasper Becker reported in his 1996 book Hungry Ghosts that China's granaries were bulging during the 1958-61 famine, the worst in history...
...That sort of personal connection to the North Korean people animates the book. Becker challenges anyone he considers to be aiding and abetting their suffering. Former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's "Sunshine Policy" of engagement with the North is denounced as a prop for Kim Jong Il's shaky regime. China, which treats refugees as illegal immigrants and repatriates them to face a nightmarish fate, is criticized for ignoring basic Geneva Convention obligations. The United Nations gets the harshest criticism. Becker spends a chapter cataloging the failures of U.N. aid agencies during North Korea's famine. Their chief...
...Becker acknowledges, it's difficult to prevent starvation in a country where the paramount leader is unmoved by the suffering of his subjects. The author makes the case that the world should act against Kim, not simply because of his nuclear program, but because of what he's done to his own people. The only way to achieve any meaningful change, Becker asserts, is to remove Kim from power. "With the right political will," he writes, "the world could quickly agree on remedies to disarm a criminal state." Perhaps, but after years of trying, the best diplomatic efforts...