The New York Sun

Bloomberg in DC: 'The Jig Is Up': Mayor Decries the Plans for Stimulus (The New York Sun)

"When you need stimulus you cut checks. You've got to get the money out the door," a senior economic adviser to Senator Obama, Austan Goolsbee, said yesterday at a campaign panel organized by the New America Foundation. more

The Bush administration is dispatching a joint Diplomatic Security-Federal Bureau of Investigation team to Khartoum to investigate the murder of an American diplomat working to promote democracy and changes in the electoral process in Sudan, John Granville. ...

A senior fellow at the New America Foundation, Peter Bergen, said he suspected the hand of Al Qaeda in the killing. "Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri have often called for attacks in Sudan in past months," Mr. Bergen said. "They see the… more

Getting a library card, going to the dentist, and keeping a job will soon yield up to $6,000 a year in bonus cash under a test program that New York City is trying as part of Mayor Bloomberg's anti-poverty initiative.About 13,000 families will be eligible for the payments, part of a $50 million program whose details were announced yesterday by the deputy mayor for health and human services, Linda Gibbs.The idea is to offer payments to… more

The Bush administration is beginning to appease rather than confront America's enemies, a former chairman of the Defense Policy Board and leading neoconservative thinker said yesterday, describing the president as "a failure" who is proving powerless to impose his views on his administration.Richard Perle offered a withering assessment of the president's impotence...saying American foreign policy is being applied by an out-of-control State Department.Although Mr. Perle said he no longer has access to the president, he said… more

With a droll, self-deprecating demeanor, Robert Wright engages a smiling Mickey Kaus each week in a conversation broadcast on their Web site, Bloggingheads.tv. Their running quarrel has attracted a growing number of Web users who want to see rather than merely read bloggers — and who appreciate the efforts to wrestle with the issues of the day.

Mr. Wright, a lean, neatly dressed fellow with a slightly dyspeptic online persona, is more liberal than Mr. Kaus. The founder of the blog… more

Just before the turn of the 20th century, a young inventor named Signor Marconi bluffed, guessed, and welded his way into creating the world's first radio. He wasn't sure how it worked, but it did. In 1896, he displayed the future of Howard Stern and Clear Channel, creating an electric charge in one wooden box that rang a bell in another across a West London room.

It didn't take long for Marconi to figure out how to transmit signals much longer… more

Robert Baer hates the Saudi royal family and Washington's coziness with it -- and his ripping book couldn't be better timed. Just last week Congress released the report of its investigation into the September 11th attacks, with a 28-page section on Saudi Arabia blacked out because we can't embarrass such close friends of ours, even if it might help explain the last attack and prevent the next one.

The House of Saud, argues the former CIA Middle East operative,… more

Sharon Beder has an important and controversial story to tell in "Power Play," her new book on electricity privatization from Edison to Enron.

Her thesis is that electricity privatization has always been a confidence game. Corporations have convinced the public and elected officials that public control of electricity is inefficient, uneconomic, and even un-American. If the public and the government aren't convinced, the electricity companies just buy them. Once in control, the corporations manipulate markets, waste resources, and make a… more