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...exactly open to criticism, either. Last January, FARC guerrillas waited until an anti-Marxist priest finished saying mass in the Putumayo district, then walked up to the pulpit and shot him dead in front of his congregation. Local justice is meted out by guerrilla "people's courts" whose judges seldom have a high school diploma. And while the FARC may earn most of its revenue from taxing the cocaine trade, any guerrilla caught sampling the product is executed by his comrades...
Politicians are supposed to think we're assholes - leastways, they should if we're doing our jobs, which seldom involves taking them at their carefully spun word. So while many in the profession have expressed outrage and disappointment that Governor George W. Bush on Monday inadvertently broadcast an aside to his running mate referring to New York Times scribe Adam Clymer by that epithet, nobody could really have been surprised. After all, it has been Clymer's job to compare the public image created by the Bush-Cheney ticket with both men's record - and the politician for whom such...
...questions. On math quizzes, students should be able to show how they arrived at their answer. The tests widely used today often rely too much on multiple-choice questions, which encourage guessing rather than thinking. Also, they often ignore the importance of knowledge. Today's history tests, for example, seldom expect the student to know any history - sometimes derided as "mere facts" - but only to be able to read charts, graphs and cartoons...
First novels seldom attract financial interest from Hollywood, but when they do, as in the case of Peter Benchley's Jaws or Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent, the selling points tend to be strong characters and a plot long on tension and surprises. That's a fair description of Christina Schwarz's Drowning Ruth (Doubleday; 338 pages; $23.95), which probably explains why, even before its publication, Miramax bought the screen rights for director Wes Craven. Readers should not wait for the film version, though, because this unusually deft and assured first novel conveys a good deal more than thrills...
Cheney's degree of access was rare. Bush is known for having a minute inner circle--three aides, a handful of friends. For all his outer amiability, Bush is something of a hermit, "not very sociable," by his own account. He's seldom out and about evenings in Austin, likes to fall asleep watching sports stretched out on the sofa and has no qualms about leaving a roomful of hands unshaken in favor of downtime. His weekend getaway is 1,600 acres of dusty, dry prairie in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do but chop wood and drive...