Weekly Review

The wire master and his puppets, 1875. After seven years of litigation, more than 10,000 firefighters, police officers, and other workers who sued New York City over health damages they suffered during the September 11 recovery efforts approved a settlement worth at least $625 million, with individual payouts ranging… Read More

The Group of 20 met in Seoul. World leaders accepted new policies meant to avoid “currency wars,” but Barack Obamaâ??s proposal of a 4 percent limit on national trade deficits was stymied by China and Germany, and the summit was largely a failure. “Instead of hitting home… Read More

An American cattleman. Republicans took control of the House after picking up 60 seats in midterm elections, the largest gain in the House since 1948. Democrats maintained control of the Senate (though they lost six seats), and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did not lose to Tea… Read More

Mail bombs sent from Yemen and addressed to a Chicago synagogue were intercepted by law enforcement officials in Britain and Dubai acting on a last minute tip, by way of Saudi intelligence, from Jaber al-Faifi, a “repentant” Al Qaeda operative and former Guantanamo Bay detainee. The bombs,… Read More

A kinkajou, 1886. WikiLeaks released 391,832 U.S. ArmyIraq War field reports. The documents revealed the rampant burning, lashing, and execution of detainees by Iraqi army and police officers; U.S. suspicions that Shiite Iraqi militants were being trained by Iran; the increasing reliance on private contractors… Read More

Thirty-three Chilean miners who had spent sixty-nine days trapped 2,000 feet underneath the Atacama Desert were rescued. The miners were carried one-by-one to the surface in a custom-made capsule. Most were in good health. One miner emerged and began leading chants of “Chi-chi-chi, le-le-le!” Another juggled a soccer ball, and… Read More

A Christian martyr. The United Nations hosted a six-day climate-change conference in China with the aim of accelerating “the search for common ground” among developed and developing nations on preventing global warming. “As governments, you can continue to stand still or move forward,” said the UNâ??s climate-change… Read More

A Small Family. President Barack Obama‘s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, announced in a video that he planned to resign from the White House to run for mayor of Chicago, and called for leadership that is “smart enough to know what government should doâ??and also what it… Read More

Caught in the Web, 1860. Republican senators blocked a $726 billion defense bill containing provisions to repeal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and provide U.S. citizenship to some foreign-born children of undocumented immigrants.WSJLady Gaga lobbied senators to… Read More

The wire master and his puppets, 1875. The Tea Party scored several upsets in midterm primary elections, with Christine O’Donnell winning the Republican nomination for Senate in Delaware. O’Donnell was endorsed by Sarah Palin but criticized by many prominent Republicans, including Karl Rove, who accused her of… Read More

An American cattleman. At the World Trade Center site, bells tolled at 8:46 a.m. to commemorate the exact moment that the first plane struck the north tower, and the names of nearly 3,000 victims of the 2001 terrorist attacks were read. Many victims’ relatives used the occasion to… Read More

One of the busiest vacation weekends of the year was marred by Hurricane Earl, which prompted evacuations from Puerto Rico to North Carolina, a suspension of Amtrak service between New York and Boston, and the cancellation of dozens of airline flights. Yet the storm waned quickly and moved out… Read More

Two thousand seven hundred twenty-two days after U.S. troops crossed the Kuwaiti border into Iraq, U.S. combat operations there officially ended. Vice President Joseph Biden arrived to usher in ”Operation New Dawn,” during which the nearly 50,000 American troops remaining in the country will still be available for combat… Read More

A kinkajou, 1886. The developers of the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero–whose project continues to lack a lobbyist, engineer, architect, blueprint, and, according to their most recent disclosure, $99,981,745 of the $100 million they intend to raise–did not agree to meet with Governor David Paterson, who… Read More

President Obama, during a Ramadan dinner at the White House, expressed his support for the First Amendment. “As a citizen, and as president,” Obama said, “I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country. And that includes the right… Read More

A Christian martyr. Federal judge Vaughn Walker ruled that California’s Proposition 8, which sought to ban gay marriage, violates the equal protection clause of the Constitution. “Moral disapproval alone is an improper basis on which to deny rights to gay men and lesbians,” the judge said in his… Read More

A Small Family. Monsoon rains caused the worst flooding in Pakistan’s history, wiping out entire villages and killing more than 1,100 people. “We saw destruction during the three years of the Taliban and then during their fight with the army,” said Fazal Maula, whose house in the Swat… Read More

Wikileaks released thousands of military field reports from six years of the war in Afghanistan, including several asserting that representatives of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence met with Taliban leaders to coordinate attacks against American troops and plan assassinations of Afghan leaders, and that the Taliban has been using heat-seeking… Read More

The wire master and his puppets, 1875. BP successfully capped its hemorrhaging Deepwater Horizon wellhead with an 18-foot, 150,000-pound stopper, 86 days after the rig exploded. The Obama Administration pushed for temporarily reopening the cap and piping oil to the surface to ease pressure on the unstable well,… Read More

An American cattleman. In one of the largest spy swaps since the Cold War, ten Russian agents who pleaded guilty to espionage in the United States were flown to Vienna, where they were exchanged for four men who had been found guilty of spying for America and… Read More

The Senate Judiciary Committee held confirmation hearings for Elena Kagan, the nominee to replace retiring Justice John Paul Stevens on the U.S. Supreme Court. G.O.P senators attacked Kagan by comparing her with former justice Thurgood Marshall, for whom she clerked in the 1980s. According to Republicans, Marshall, the nation’s… Read More

Caught in the Web, 1860. June became the deadliest month thus far for coalition forces in the Afghan war, with at least 80 killed, including 46 Americans. General Stanley McChrystal resigned in disgrace after a magazine article quoted him mocking the civilian leadership and revealing that his favorite beer… Read More

President Barack Obama premiered a new political narrative of the BP oil spill during a nationally televised address. Instead of portraying government efforts as a cleanup, Obama described a “battle plan”: the oil flowing from the destroyed BP wellhead was not an industrial accident but a “siege” and an… Read More

A Christian martyr. A U.S. government panel announced that since April 20 between 20,000 and 40,000 barrels of oil (1.7 million gallons) have leaked from a BP wellhead into the Gulf of Mexico every day. (The government’s original estimate, made a week after the spill began, was 5,000… Read More

Israeli naval commandos raided the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish ship in an aid flotilla that sought to circumvent Israel’s blockade of Gaza, and killed nine people.New York TimesAccording to Israeli officials, the commandos intended to take control of the ship… Read More

The wire master and his puppets, 1875. Forty days after its rig started gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, BP announced that the “top kill” effort, in which mud was used to try to plug the leak, had failed. CEO Tony Hayward said, “I’m sorry,” and, “There… Read More

An American cattleman. A van filled with 1,650 pounds of explosives rammed into a NATO convoy in Kabul, killing 18 people, including five Americans, and bringing the total number of American dead in Afghanistan to more than 1,000. “What do you want me to do with this?” an… Read More

Conservative Party leader David Cameron became the British prime minister after agreeing to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats. Cameron and the Tories joined with Nick Clegg’s Liberal Democrats after Clegg began negotiating with Labour Party leaders about ruling through a minority coalition. Clegg’s bluff… Read More

Caught in the Web, 1860. One trillion virtual dollars vanished from the U.S. stock market in fifteen minutes, as a mysterious surge of sales triggered a chain reaction in the high-speed automatic-trading computers that account for more than half of all market activity. It was rumored that a trader… Read More

In New York City, a Nissan Pathfinder filled with gasoline, propane, dud firecrackers, alarm clocks, and eight bags of fertilizer failed to explode in Times Square. Janet Napolitano, U.S. secretary of homeland security, characterized the attempted car bombing as a “one-off,” not indicative of an organized terrorist plot, while… Read More