Republicans in the Wilderness: Is the Party Over?

These days, Republicans have the desperate aura of an endangered species. They lost Congress, then the White House; more recently, they lost a slam-dunk House election in a conservative New York district, then Senator Arlen Specter. Polls suggest that only one-fourth of the electorate considers itself Republican, that independents are trending Democratic and that as few as five states have solid Republican pluralities.

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Who Really Killed the Rocky Mountain News?

“We are just deeply sorry.” That’s all E.W. Scripps Co.’s Cincinnati, Ohio–based executives could mumble last week in closing Colorado’s oldest company, the 150-year-old Rocky Mountain News. In shuttering an operation sprung in 1859 from a gold-mining camp just blocks from its downtown Denver home, Scripps directly or obliquely blamed everything — the economy, the Internet, demographics — and everybody — Denver Post panjandrum William Dean Singleton, ignorant consumers, bloggers — for the diminished tabloid’s demise

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Will Obama convince allies to help out in Afghanistan?

As the debate plays out about whether President Obama’s decision to send an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan will help ease the increase in Taliban insurgency, the president is reaching out to allies for help. Obama said in an interview on Canadian television Tuesday that diplomacy will play a bigger role in U.S. efforts in Afghanistan.

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An explosion, a scream, then silence

For 25 agonizing minutes, journalist Norm Beaman did not know whether his wife had perished in wild fires sweeping southern Australia, after he lost mobile phone contact following an explosion and a scream. Beaman, a veteran reporter for Channel 7 news, was racing home to his property on Mount Disappointment, north of Melbourne, talking to his wife Annie as she tried to defend their home from the fires that have left dozens dead.

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