“Pigs in Heaven” is full of miracles, especially the kind that start out-like Turtle’s life-as disasters. At the beginning of the novel, Turtle and Taylor are on a trip to the Hoover Dam, where Turtle is the only person to see a man fall over the side. Taylor finally persuades someone to believe her daughter, and the rescue makes Turtle a heroine. But becoming a heroine, which culminates in an appearance on “Oprah,” engenders a new disaster....
The trouble is, many of Buchanan’s most ardent fans in Iowa define “New World Order” somewhat more juicily. “It’s the international conspiracy,” said Ralph Clements, who cheered Buchanan in Waterloo. “It’s the bankers who want to establish a one-world government.” (It’s also the title of a ridiculous book by the tele-mongerer Pat Robertson rehearsing the greatest hits of modern paranoia.) Clements is, in some ways, Buchanan’s dream supporter: a retired blue-collar escapee from the Democratic Party....
The Kurds have no friends." In the mountains of northern Iraq, the old maxim is the stuff of common sense. When the gulf war began, it also held true in the corridors of Washington. Last August, within a few days after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Jalal Talabani, exiled leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, phoned Peter Galbraith, a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “Peter,” he said. “Should I come to Washington?...
With conference tournament action heating up, here are four picks for Friday from The Linemakers on Sporting News: Purdue (-5.5, 133) vs. Penn State, 2:30 p.m. ET, ESPN: A lot has changed since these teams met on Jan. 17, an 84-77 Purdue (+1) win in overtime at Penn State. The Boilermakers were a squad trying to find its identity after bad losses to North Florida and Gardner Webb, and they accomplished that against Penn State....
Down in 13th place, they suddenly sat just seven points above the drop zone. The pressure was on. And this weekend, against a Sunderland side which had just roared to a stunning 4-0 demolition of Crystal Palace, there could be no more slip-ups. But Saints fans needn’t have worried, not with new signing Manolo Gabbiadini leading the line. The Italian kicked on from his debut Premier League goal the previous week to score an impressive 97/100 on the Goal Pressure Index, presented by Sure and powered by Opta data, which provides the first ever system to measure and rate a team and player’s performance under pressure....
Ben Givens is a retired heart surgeon, who recently learned that he’s dying of colon cancer. He has told no one. One October day, he and his beloved bird dogs head out on a hunt, during which he plans to stage an accident and shoot himself. Even if you believe the good doctor will really pull the trigger–do you?–“East” is a slow, solitary book, its plot a distressingly slack wire....
The day had begun badly eight hours earlier, when I traveled with two other reporters to the town of Zormat. Our aim was to interview a local Afghan commander, Naim Faruki. Zormat is a rambling collection of shacks on the road to Shahikot, the target of B-52 bombing raids in Operation Anaconda. Nearby hillsides are tarred black with bomb scars, and the locals are a well-armed, suspicious–and suspect–lot. We quickly learned that Faruki had been arrested 12 days earlier by American forces....
There are currently eight people listed under the term, “editors,” at the top. This is followed by a list spelling out some familiar roles at a literary magazine (managing editor, editor at large, senior editor) and some less familiar roles (Paris editor, London editor, assistant London editor). Then there are the “special consultants,” the “contributing editors” and finally the “advisory editors,” all with a clump of names beneath them, many of them familiar....
Other CIA paramilitary officers did have horses, however. And they rode them to victory, in an improbable, partly planned, partly improvised assault on the Taliban that combined high-tech and ancient modes of war. The CIA’s success in Afghanistan–the agency’s ability to get on the ground quickly, join up with Northern Alliance fighters and guide U.S. Special Forces teams to the enemy–came as a surprise and a relief to many intelligence experts, inside and outside the government....
The new chancellor’s personal poll ratings remain high. But that’s about the only good news he’s heard lately. The Hesse defeat meant that Schroder’s SPD lost its majority in the upper house of Parliament, which could stymie its attempts to push through controversial legislation. ““They will have to talk to us now when they want to pass a law,’’ exulted Angela Merkel, the general secretary of the Christian Democrats. Last week also brought the unsettling news that unemployment, which had dipped below 11 percent late last year, has climbed back up to 11....
Gritty, grunged and boasting as many girls as guys, poetry has made a comeback-in a bohemian rhapsody of rap swagger and fiercely urban poems that has done more to revive interest in verse than anything since the Beat Generation was filling coffeehouses from the East Village to the Mission district. In the last year, poetry clubs with such arch-sounding names as the Fez, the Elbo Room and the Nuyorican have become a hot alternative to dance clubs in cities from New York to Nashville, from Boston to L....
The ghost of Sarah has Bo spooked about finally proposing to sultry Cassie. But, wait, is Sarah really dead? Rex donated his sperm to Leanna, but she’s looking for someone else to play daddy. Sex tapes! A car accident! If only Brooke and Ridge knew about the forged letter! Crazy Janet pushed Sis down a well and took her place alongside poor confused Trevor. Oh, that old thing.
It’s an affair you’d rather read about than live through. Kate, the girlfriend, is a jealous, unloving writer who’s on to Daniel before anything has actually happened, and descends into a zinfandel-fueled rage. Meanwhile, Iris’s husband, an investment banker named Hampton, pays more attention to racial slights (both real and imagined) than he does to his wife. After months of chatting with Iris and a few cups of coffee, Daniel takes Ruby over to Iris’s house to play with her son, and gets stuck there overnight in a snowstorm....
Despite Francis Fukuyama’s infamous opinion, history certainly did not end. The imperial collapse was an unintended consequence of Gorbachev’s desire to humanize socialism and save the USSR. He utterly failed in both tasks, but Russia and other Soviet republics were liberated from the Communist nightmare, and the world gained 30 years of relative peace, which is now coming to an end. Gorbachev, who began his career as a combine harvester operator, did not need to launch the monumental reforms of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) that lead to the USSR’s demise....
This month has also seen a a new monthly record for COVID-19 fatalities, with 45 deaths since September 1. This is two more than the previous highest monthly recorded in May. In total, North Dakota has had 17,958confirmed cases of COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic. Of these, 5,959 have been identified in September, figures from the North Dakota Department of Health show. On Saturday, North Dakota reported eight COVID-19-related deaths—all in Morton County—taking its overall total to 192....
On Wednesday, a White House spokesperson said the policy was delayed but has not been abandoned. In the meantime, Trump continues to weigh “all sides” of the vaping epidemic, which has affected more than 5 million U.S. youths. Nearly 2,300 e-cigarette users have reported lung injuries that physicians say resemble chemical burns, and 47 deaths have been confirmed. Federal health officials first became aware of the epidemic in the summer of 2018, when vaping was spiking among high school and middle school students....
The former Patriots tight end facing two murder trials next year, is scheduled for a pre-trial hearing on Thursday afternoon in Suffolk County, Mass., Superior Court, where he faces double-murder charges in a 2012 slaying in Boston. STEELE: How legal team will handle two trials in five months The last time Hernandez was in court for the double-murder, back in early July, a judge refused to issue a gag order requested by Hernandez’s lawyers, who were able to get a similar order from a judge in Bristol County in the Odin Lloyd murder case....
According to the Boston Globe, Bradley’s grant of immunity was revealed in a legal filing in federal court in Florida, where Bradley is suing Hernandez for shooting him in the face in 2013 after the pair argued in a Miami strip club. MORE: Images from the Aaron Hernandez investigation It is unclear if Bradley will testify against Hernandez when he goes on trial at the end of the year for allegedly gunning down Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado in Boston’s South End in 2012....
