In Lebanon, opposition to the minority government led to 15 years of brutal civil war. At the time, President Ronald Reagan was harshly criticized for withdrawing our troops after the bombing of our marine barracks in Beirut. Dire predictions were made by The Hawks who insisted it would erode our credibility and embolden the Soviets. […]

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Immigration reform is now in the hands of the Republican-controlled house, and the judiciary committee released its own version of a guest-worker program that passed committee Wednesday. The bill, proposed by Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va., pictured) removes wage protections, takes the program out of the hands of the Department of Labor, and limits the ability […]

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Despite the cries of protest and the outrage, and despite the widespread banning of the magazine, the image of Boston marathon bomber Dzhoktar Tsarnaev now depicted on the latest issue of Rolling Stone does not “glorify” the photogenic bomber. Rather, the power of the image of Tsarnaev—wearing a designer t-shirt and looking every bit like […]

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The acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, has a violent history in the American public imagination in which black men are routinely represented as the aggressor to justify white violence. From late 19th century lynchings in the name of “protecting” white womanhood and Emmett Till’s 1955 murder to […]

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In the 1970s and 1980s, mathematicians, computer scientists and engineers, having realized that electronic communications required encryption for the sake of privacy, started working on developing tools for providing just that. Academic research is public. At its best, it is open for inspection, perusal, sharing, distribution and modification. That means if research on privacy-enhancing cryptography […]

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