In Iowa, Gingrich Evokes Reagan’s ’11th Commandment’; Plans Final Push

Newt Gingrich campaigned across Iowa this week to mostly big crowds. And he is planning a 44-stop bus tour that begins after Christmas and leads into the Jan. 3 caucuses. People in Iowa are concerned about jobs and the cost of doing business — key issues for Gingrich and the Republican Party. But the former [...]

As Gingrich Stumps In Iowa, His Style Evolves

Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s campaign has been down and then up this year. His top staffers resigned en masse in June, leading many to wonder whether he was out of the race. Then came debates in which the former speaker of the House shined. Yet he didn’t really start campaigning in earnest until last [...]

‘Incredibly Close’: Mapping A Life, After A Loss

Lauded as a wunderkind for his first novel, Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer was mostly pilloried for his second, a heavily semiotic saga of a family struggling to regroup after losing a member in the Sept. 11 attacks. “Cutesy” and “overstuffed” cropped up frequently in reviews of the novel, and some early notices for [...]

Spielberg’s ‘War Horse’: An Epic Battlefield Ride

This year, many filmmakers have looked fondly to the past for inspiration. Martin Scorsese celebrated the birth of cinema in Hugo; Michel Hazanavicius paid tribute to the transition from the silents to the talkies in The Artist; Nicolas Winding Refn even claims to have paid an oblique homage to the ’80s oeuvre of Molly Ringwald [...]

With ‘Lie Of The Year’ Controversy, Fact Checking Comes Under Scrutiny

The fact-checking movement has been gaining momentum and gaining fans. Journalistic fact checkers serve as referees by calling foul — and fair — on various assertions by politicians, public figures and pundits with heavily documented analyses. But a slow-burn backlash flared into the open this past week. Much of it centered on Bill Adair, the [...]

Medicare Can’t Rescue Congress On Fix For Doctors’ Pay

Here we go again. With official Washington trapped in partisan gridlock, doctors who treat Medicare patients are once again facing the prospect of a big cut in pay that almost no one supports. And this time Medicare officials say they won’t be hold onto the bills for longer than the usual 10-day processing time to [...]

Future Dim For 100-Watt Bulb, Despite Congress’ Stall

The trillion-dollar budget bill that Congress passed last weekend includes plenty of non-spending provisions tucked into it. One of these so-called riders is aimed at saving the 100-watt incandescent light bulb. But the move is more about politics than light. Strictly speaking, the issue is this: Old-fashioned incandescent bulbs waste a lot of energy. So [...]

Tinsel Tales 2011: NPR Christmas Stories

Christmas is a time of traditions, and over the years, NPR has created a few traditions of its own. In this hour-long special: Wistfulness, joy, doubt, hope — all the emotions we feel at this time of year, are summoned up in memorable stories from the NPR broadcast archives. NPR voices, past and present, tell [...]

Pentagon: U.S., Pakistan Share Blame In Shooting

The U.S. military said Thursday that U.S. and Pakistani forces both made mistakes in a U.S. helicopter attack that killed two dozen Pakistani troops in November along the Afghan-Pakistan border. The Pentagon released the findings of its investigation that said a lack of trust, miscommunication and faulty map information all contributed to the shooting. “For [...]

Procrastinators’ Paradise: A Busy Week For Shipping

This week marks the busiest time of the year for shipping services like UPS, FedEx and the Postal Service. The post office handled 600 million cards and letters alone on Tuesday, and UPS says it is delivering 300 packages per second, on average. At one FedEx facility in Washington, D.C., the logistics of last-minute shipping [...]