Word: south
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...steering a great country aground and shackling its potential. Some 8 million people listen to Beck's radio program, and this year his Fox News Channel show became required viewing for the right. Predictably, he drew white-hot hatred from liberals and even some fellow libertarians: the creators of South Park spoofed him in a hilarious November episode in which the fat Cartman played Beck. This time, Beck didn't weep. Instead, he laughed along and then noted, accurately, that the show had also taken on Jesus Christ...
...news that a lesbian had been elected mayor of Houston, deep in the heart of the conservative South, was greeted with surprise this week. After defeats on gay marriage in places deemed far more gay-friendly than Texas, like Maine and New York, the victory of Annise Parker, who is in a committed relationship with two children, was a welcome, if puzzling, achievement for advocates of gay rights. The mayor-elect's photograph, showing her smiling sweetly and looking like Barbara Bush, was plastered everywhere from the Drudge Report to China's Xinhua news service, shattering all manner of clich...
...rights activists were buoyed. "The fact that an openly gay candidate wins for mayor in the nation's fourth largest city, in the South, in Texas, shows that when Americans get to know gay people as people, not as stereotypes, their resistance to treating gay people equally reduces," Evan Wolfson, director of Freedom to Marry, a gay-marriage advocacy group, told USA Today. (See a two-minute bio of Annise Parker...
...terms of geography, Houston may be a city in the Old South, but its personality is a mix of Western frontier and Third World boomtown: dynamic, diverse, a place to make a fortune and lose one. Only 40% of greater Houston area residents live inside the Loop, the freeway that defines Houston's city limits, and only 1 million of the city's 2.2 million residents are registered voters. Many are immigrants who cannot vote. The key to winning any Houston mayoral race is coalition-building, and Parker's political career has been deliberate, "low risk" and "canny," according...
...that the FARC, having been seriously weakened by Uribe's military drive against them, have increasingly begun to refine cocaine in Ecuador rather than just smuggling it. Ecuadorian police have discovered numerous drug labs near the borders with Colombia and Peru as well as on farms deep inside the South American country, including one just west of the capital, Quito. René Vargas Pazzos, a retired general and former ambassador to Venezuela, rented a farm to a FARC commander, the report says. As a result, Huerta warned that Ecuador faces the same corrosive influence from the drug trade that neighboring...