Though it is too early to judge the success of an administration, President Bush is headed in the right direction on many fronts. It is hoped that his leadership will have lasting effects in many areas.
The new U.S. census figures have generated banner headlines this month, though no one seems to have a clue what those numbers portend. The big news, of course, is that America\’s Latino population has ballooned almost 60 percent in the past decade, surpassing 35 million. More than 43 percent of Californians younger than 18 are now Hispanic, compared with about 35 percent a decade ago. In both the city and county of Los Angeles, Latinos have replaced whites as the largest ethnic group.
A time for peace and a time for war. Most talk, for years, has been about peace, but there\’s war talk in Israel now. At least one independent intelligence agency is predicting a regional war this spring, and nobody is offering credible deniability. The Palestinians have been smuggling weapons into the country — mortars, anti-tank weapons, heavy machine guns, who knows what else. The stuff comes into Gaza through tunnels from Egypt or sneaked past Israeli naval patrols along the coast. It\’s not Jordan they\’re gunning for, at least not to start.
My fireplace mantle is stuffed &\’9;with get-well cards. They come from people I know and many I\’ve never met. One of them might have come from you. In the two months since I started writing about my lung cancer, the cards have been flowing in, plus an equal number or more of e-mails. They touch me deeply.
Who is the most distrusted and despised Israeli politician in the Arab world? The answer is not to be found among the usual suspects — current and former Likud prime ministers Ariel Sharon and Binyamin Netanyahu. Rather, it is the dove incarnate: Shimon Peres.
Have you ever been to the funeral of a 10-month-old? It has to be one of the most unnatural of human experiences. The burial of an infant who was deliberately murdered by terrorists is all the more tragic for the baseless hate it represents.
Six months into the Palestinian uprising, Israeli doves and hawks are displaying a rare unity in the face of repeated Palestinian onslaughts.
There were more police than customers in Jerusalem\’s Mahane Yehuda market last Friday morning, when Jewish families would normally stock up for the weekend. Downtown, the strolling, shopping and coffee-bar crowds had deserted the Ben-Yehuda pedestrian mall for the fashionable German Colony.
For those who believed President George W. Bush would chart a moderate course, the administration\’s first two months must come as a rude awakening. Those who were lulled into believing that Bush was a compassionate conservative have now discovered that only the latter half of this otherwise vacuous campaign slogan is true.
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