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...What kept McCourt alive then, and would make him as a writer, was his humor and his love of words. "In reality, our life was worse than Frank wrote," said McCourt's brother, also called Malachy. "Insane outbreaks of laughter saved us." McCourt once said that as a child he dreamed of being a prison inmate in the U.S., for the food and warmth. Instead he became a hospital inmate: he caught typhoid at age 10 and spent three months well fed in a well-heated hospital. The hospital also had a well-stocked library. It was there that...
Although he kept a journal and dabbled in journalism and the theater, McCourt spent most of the next 30 years teaching English and creative writing in New York City schools for a modest salary. He had a natural flair for it. On his very first day in the classroom, one of his young charges threw a sandwich at another kid. McCourt picked it up and ate it in front of the class, while the students watched, stunned. He had taught his first lesson: an object lesson in what it means to survive starvation...
...National Liberation Front over the repressive U.S.-backed Somoza dynasty. Nicaragua's continual Christmas theme is also appropriate because President Ortega governs Nicaragua a bit like Santa Claus. Not because he is jolly or has a tummy like a bowl full of jelly (Ortega is very serious and has kept in remarkably good shape for a 63-year-old), but because the Sandinista boss uses gifts to keep people in line, and always double checks his list of who's naughty and who's nice. (Check out a story on Nicaragua's vampire problem...
...health-care reform has been to study everything the Clinton Administration did in 1993 and '94 - and do the opposite. Where Bill and Hillary Clinton delivered a byzantine bill of more than 1,300 pages to Capitol Hill, only to see it shredded once it got there, Obama has kept his distance from the fine print. He set forth a few ambitious goals: expanding coverage, reining in health-care spending, improving medical quality. And then he left it to Congress to develop a plan that could win the votes necessary to pass...
...June 24, CIA Director Leon Panetta made a confession. For the past eight years, the agency has been running a top-secret unit to assassinate or grab members of al-Qaeda. The program was deliberately kept from Congress - supposedly on former Vice President Dick Cheney's orders - and Panetta stopped it as soon as he heard about...