(Rendering Yale-NUS College | Source: Yale-NUS) U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Robert O. Blake performed the diplomatic equivalent of gold-medal figure skating last April in a meeting at the authoritarian central Asian nation of Kazakhstan’s Nazarbayev University when a student asked him about warnings by American critics and human-rights monitors that “a democracy cannot have […]

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(Don Siegelman | Source: Birmingham News) Tom DeLay said his felony conviction was overturned because he kept the “joy of Jesus” in his heart. Providentially, that is, two Republican state appellate judges in Texas decided that the $190,000 in soft (corporate) money that DeLay’s Texas PAC sent to a Republican national PAC, which returned $190,000 […]

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  In 1969, Gaylord Nelson, seven years out of the U.S. Senate, called on Denis Hayes to organize what Nelson envisioned as a national teach-in on the environment. The result was the first Earth Day, conceived of by the former Democratic senator and realized by Hayes and a staff of 85. Today Hayes is head […]

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  I grew up as an oil geologist, worked in Mississippi and Alabama for several years, so it’s not with the sometimes-reflexive reaction of a typical treehugger that I report from Montana with the news that the future of the world may well depend upon obscure and little-known events that are taking place in wild […]

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  Bellingham, Washington   At dusk on a warm Wednesday afternoon in September, a Lummi couple in their sixties had just finished picking kelp out of a gill net they had stretched out into Bellingham Bay. The wind was calm and the water so clear that every stone on the bottom was visible. The incoming […]

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