Turkey wants to see Bashar al-Assad go and wants to kind of expand its sphere of influence into Turkey so its Ottoman glory or Ottoman past are once again project into the Syrian provinces. That's kind of what Turkey's vision is.
Andrew Jackson was the first president to claim that the desires of the public overrode Congress's constitutional prerogatives. Virtually every president since Jackson has claimed the mantle, even while lacking two ingredients of an electoral mandate...
Obama does not need to worry as much as past Democratic presidents about being labeled soft on national security - not after giving the order that led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden. No, his biggest concern is being labeled tone deaf on jobl...
Sitting in the Oval Office, beneath a painting of George Washington, with a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. over his right shoulder and a bust of Abraham Lincoln over his left shoulder, Obama told 'National Journal' that the country's economic woes ar...
Most political journalists come to Washington because they're snappy writers, big thinkers, or news breakers. Me? My ticket to the big leagues had little to do with talent. It was mostly about the governor I was covering, Bill Clinton.
I was the only child, and I know my father had certain thoughts about me. He was a lawyer and extremely literary, but he would have been much happier if I had wanted to be a lawyer, a scientist, an engineer. But what I wanted to do was read.
For Russians, to whom Pushkin's poem 'Eugene Onegin' is sacred text, the ballet's story and personae are as familiar and filled with meaning as, for instance, 'Romeo' and 'Hamlet' are for us. Russians know whole stretches of it by heart, the way we k...
I find Maersk fascinating. It is the Coca-Cola of freight with none of the fame. Its parent company, A. P. Moller-Maersk, is Denmark's largest company, its sales equal to 20 percent of Denmark's GDP; its ships use more oil than the entire nation.
Along with all the other stunning statistics China can provide, it can also claim to be the world leader in making energy from human excrement. Biogas, as this energy is known, can be produced from the fermentation of any organic material, from wood ...
Ships are obliged to take on harbor or river pilots - who provide specialized local navigation - when they approach a port, but in the canal, a Suez crew is also obligatory. The crew members are there in case the ship needs to be moored during the ca...
My mother watched her loving husband look at her with blankness or contempt and sometimes hatred. And yet dementia is classed as a social condition, so that the state is not required to pay for long-term residential care. Calling it what it is - brai...
There are few industries as defiantly opaque as shipping. Even offshore bankers have not developed a system as intricately elusive as the flag of convenience, under which ships can fly the flag of a state that has nothing to do with its owner, cargo,...
Since the 1920s, when some U.S. cruise ships decided to fly a Panamanian flag to avoid Prohibition regulations, ships have commonly flown the flag of countries foreign to their owners. The benefits are obvious: lower taxes, laxer labor and safety law...
Shipping is the greenest method of transport. In terms of carbon emissions per ton per mile, it emits about a thousandth of aviation and about a tenth of trucking. But it's not benign, because there's so much of it. So shipping emissions are about th...
I think about what's going down my sink. So I won't pour oil down my sink. I won't - if I'm cleaning a pan, I'll wipe it and bin because I've seen - I've been down sewers.
People always say there's no such thing as bad publicity, and you always think they're right, because it seems self-evident: nobody's going to buy a magazine that nobody ever talks about, so people should want to buy a magazine that everybody's talki...
You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it...
I have met some very strange people and some very strange cats - and I'm not talking about jazz greats. I'm talking about animals that people claim have come from outer space, and boy, they're weird!
Back on Nov. 23, 1963, I sailed into Manhattan Harbor onboard the Queen Mary and landed with no job and contacts and just $135 in my pocket. My first lodging was in a rundown hotel for $27 a week with the bathroom down the end of a corridor of beds.
Ever since Katrina, there has been a proliferation of efforts at the state level and among hospital administrators to come up with guidelines that would help professionals stuck in a situation like this to prioritize patients. These are questions of ...
While Hurricane Katrina demonstrated the dangers of failing to evacuate hospitals from the path of a storm, Hurricane Gustav demonstrated that moving thousands of sick people has its own risks. Gustav also highlighted a critical vulnerability of Amer...
