The flood is receding from the streets of New Orleans, but the Crescent City and the wider Gulf Coast of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama will be prostrate for the foreseeable future. At press time, the mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, has “strongly encouraged” all remaining residents to leave the city to escape the threat […]

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Double Whammy—“Wow. You got the double whammy,” President Bush once told a 9/11 widow who lost her firefighter husband on their eighth wedding anniversary. The same could be said of the events between August 29 and September 5, when Hurricane Katrina ravaged New Orleans and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist passed away. The last […]

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Tom Halsted is a former longtime Washingtonian who had a career here as a high-level public information officer for the government, specializing in energy, arms control and intelligence issues. That put him in close contact with the working press, and he eventually became a journalist himself. He became a columnist for the Daily Times of Gloucester, Massachusetts, […]

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Ask the Internet—“Ask your doctor” is the pitch promoted in all those TV prescription-drug ads. But your doctor may have been influenced to prescribe certain high-priced drugs by the industry’s big-bucks wooing of the medical profession. Among other things, that includes giving doctors free, give-away patient samples of purple pills to encourage expensive drugstore purchases […]

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