The Londoner

  S ilence Is Not An Option What will it take? What will it take for a majority of Americans to speak out for a sensible firearms policy in our nation? It will take more than a congresswoman being shot point-blank in the face as she gathers for a town meeting in Arizona. It will take more than a deranged gunman with a hundred-round magazine spraying bullets into a crowded movie theater in Colorado. It will take more t

We expect heroic tales from police, firefighters, EMTs — the highly trained first responders who run to the rescue when the rest of us run away. We don’t expect as much from schoolteachers, particularly young women barely out of college. But as new details emerge from Newtown, Conn., we’re hearing more about the heroics of teachers who risked death to protect not their own children, but the children in their care, with no weapons and little chance they’d prevail. Were you surprised? “Not at all,” said longtime educator Eileen Nash yesterday, principal of both the Beethoven School, grades K-2, and the Ohrenberger, 3-8, in West Roxbury. “Parents have entrusted those kids to us, and it’s our first responsibility to take care of them. “Any teacher,” Nash said, “would do anything for their kids.” Yesterday in West Roxbury that meant reassuring many nervous children and parents. So Nash and her vice principal met children getting off buses in t

Some Unlikely Democrats Join in Push for New Gun Laws Congressional Democrats showed signs on Monday of a more aggressive push on gun control in the wake of the Newtown killings, while Republicans and gun rights advocates remained largely silent on policy matters. Joe Manchin III, the pro-gun-rights West Virginia senator who drew attention in 2010 after running a commercial that showed him firing a rifle at an environmental bill, said that “everything should be on the table” as gun control is debated in the coming weeks and months. Representative John Yarmuth, a moderate Democrat from Kentucky, said he finally felt compelled to speak out on an issue that has been untouchable for many elected officials. “I have been largely silent on the issue of gun violence over the past six years, and I am now as sorry for that as I am for what happened to the families who lost so much in this most recent, but sadly not isolated, tragedy,” Mr. Yarmuth said in a statement. “Th

Deficit solution must preserve the American dream For families still struggling to get by, the holiday season is a time for hope that the coming year will bring new opportunities. While our economic recovery has seen significant progress, there is still much more to be done to get Americans back to work and expand our middle class. However, a serious impediment to doing so exists in the form of the fiscal cliff. That combination of automatic tax increases and arbitrary spending cuts, if allowed to hit on January 1, would significantly undermine Congress’s ability to invest in moving our recovery forward, creating new opportunities, and working toward sustained job growth. If we don’t prioritize spending or bring in sufficient revenues, programs that expand our economy and protect the most vulnerable are at risk. Indiscriminate cuts to those kinds of programs would damage the economy even furthe

A massacre that has turned the world upside down. Sunday I learned about the massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school while we were setting up at Fox News to tape Cavuto on Business . The news was so horrible that we all felt as if we had lost our legs and could no longer stand. It was such horrible news that it simply turned the world upside down. It still is that kind of news, and it’s incredibly depressing about the nature of humanity. And my wife and I pray all day for the souls of those dear children and for the peace, if there ever will be peace, of their families… and for the souls of the adults and the peace of those who knew and loved them. As usual, the smartest comment about the whole subject came from John R. Coyne, Jr. “There is evil in the world. It’s beyond mental illness, beyond gun control. It is evil.” The killer got his weapons from his mother, who apparently had bought them legally and registered them. That tells us something about what anti-gun laws

What If Nothing or Nobody is to Blame for Adam Lanza? Guns, Video Games, Autism or Authorities Eight-year old Shayne Frate, a third grade student at Sandy Hook Elementary School, hangs from her mother Valerie's back, wrapped in a Red Cross blanket to protect her from the cold, rainy weather, as she waits in line to attend an interfaith vigil in Newtown, Conn. What if there is nobody or nothing to blame for Adam Lanza's heinous acts? Other than Lanza, of course. What if school security and the school psychiatrist kept an eye on Lanza since his freshman year? The Wall Street Journal has a compelling narrative about the red flags addressed. What if he had a form of autism that has little or no link to violent behavior? Lanza may have had Asperger's syndrome but, even so, that is not a cause. What if it's too simple to lay the massacre at the feet of the gun lobby? Reader Larry Kelly tweets

The appointment of Tim Scott to replace Jim DeMint as South Carolina’s new senator is both history-making and good news for conservatives. Senator DeMint, who is leaving Congress to run the Heritage Foundation, is certainly pleased. At a Heritage dinner last week he made little secret of the fact that he wanted Scott to replace him. “He’s a good and decent man with firm convictions,” he told me. This is the second time that Scott has made history. He becomes the first black senator from the Old Confederacy since Reconstruction. In 2010, he became the first black Republican elected to the House from the South since the 1890s. His House race that year was drenched in symbolism. Scott ran in the GOP primary for the seat around Charleston against Paul Thurmond, an attorney and the son of one-time segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond. After having dispatched Thurmond easily, Scott won the general election. He took office in time to attend ceremonie

The Bracing Political Reality of Gun Control If there is any good that came of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it is that the informal stricture against “politicizing tragedy” enforced by the gun lobby and its allies, and generally complied with by the news media, crumpled, in something akin to a mass act of civil disobedience. The injunction against politicizing tragedy was itself political; now the rest of us are politicizing it back. The trouble is that most gun-control advocates are politicizing it the wrong way, in a way that’s deeply naive, and likely to crash quickly on the shoals of disillusionment. Michael Bloomberg emblemized the naivete when he spoke for vast swaths of America — and especially center-left America —  yesterday : It's time for the president, I think, to stand up and lead and tell this country what we should do — not go to Congress and s

The Loss of the Innocents NEWTOWN, Conn., is about 20 miles from the town where my wife grew up. It’s the kind of place that rewards rambling New England drives: there are big old Victorian houses flanking the main street, a hill with a huge flagpole rising in the center of town, and a large pasture just below, with shaded side roads radiating outward from the greensward, and then horse farms in the hills beyond. When you live in a hectic, self-important city, it’s easy to romanticize a town like Newtown , and maybe imagine escaping there someday, children in tow. The last time we drove through was more than a year ago: it was a summer dusk, and there were families out everywhere — kids on bikes, crowds around the ice cream stand, the images of small town innocence flickering past our car windows like slides on a carousel. Any grown-up knows that such small-town innocence is illusory, and that what looks pristine to outsiders can be as darkened by suff

She said it with flowers! Lindsay Lohan finally thanks Charlie Sheen for giving her $100,000 Lindsay Lohan has finally thanked Charlie Sheen for helping her out with money... by sending him flowers. TMZ are reporting that the beleaguered star sent her benefactor a belated card with the blooms. They write: 'LiLo didn't mean to be rude and the reason she never got around to thanking Charlie personally is because her phone broke and she lost all her contacts  - ncluding the actor's number.' Generous gift: Charlie Sheen has reportedly given his Scary Movie 5 co-star Lindsay Lohan $100,000 to help pay her crippling tax debt The former Two And A Half Men star sent the 26-year-old troubled actress a check for a reported $100,000 to cover almost half of her huge tax bill after they bonded while filming Scary Movie 5 together. While he says he was happy to 'pay it forward,' Sheen seems rather miffed by her lack of gratitude. He wouldn't co

A 20-year-old man wearing combat gear and armed with semiautomatic pistols and a semiautomatic rifle killed 26 people — 20 of them children — in an attack in an elementary school in central Connecticut on Friday. Witnesses and officials described a horrific scene as the gunman, with brutal efficiency, chose his victims in two classrooms while other students dove under desks and hid in closets.  Read the full story here.

IT hasn’t been a good year for evangelicals. I should know. I’m one of them. In 2012 we witnessed a collapse in American evangelicalism. The old religious right largely failed to affect the Republican primaries, much less the presidential election. Last month, Americans voted in favor of same-sex marriage in four states, while Florida voters rejected an amendment to restrict abortion. Much has been said about conservative Christians and their need to retool politically. But that is a smaller story, riding on the back of a larger reality: Evangelicalism as we knew it in the 20th century is disintegrating. In 2011 the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life polled church leaders from around the world. Evangelical ministers from the United States reported a greater loss of influence than church leaders from any other country — with some 82 percent indicating that their movement was losing ground. I grew up hearing tales of my grandfathe

A troubled young man in Connecticut lays his hands on the kinds of guns that no civilian should ever have and does something that no civilization should ever see. The obvious way to prevent the next such massacre is gun control . And, yes, we need it now. Voters need to be loud, politicians need to be brave, and the gun lobby needs to be defeated. Perhaps Barack Obama , no longer up for election, will no longer be chicken. Perhaps the ever-more-obvious data will be persuasive—yes, more gun control correlates with less violence, state-by-state and country-by-country. But American violence doesn’t just come from the assault weapons we buy and the gun shows we frequent. It’s much deeper than that. This is also the country that supplies three-quarters of the world’s arms trade. These are weapons sales authorized by our government and by a Democratic President. International weapon sales by America between 2010 and 2011 tripled . The same Democratic President continues

America: Too many guns, too little will to change Newtown, Connecticut, joins a rollcall of towns whose names become synonymous with violent death. The President has a fight on his hands Share +More This column, readers should be warned from the outset, is an exercise in futility. Not a single argument in it is new. It, and the myriad similar ones which have appeared these last 24 hours, might have been published a year ago, five years ago, even 20 years ago. In fact, they were – but in the interim, nothing, absolutely nothing, has changed. And that is the real tragedy and disgrace of Friday's mass shooting in Connecticut. The simple truth is that for all the ink spilt and outrage voiced, such incidents have become more, not less frequent since I first arrived in the US in 1991. That October, I was writing my first rampage story, about an unemployed merchant seaman named George Hennard who drove his pick-up

In the wake of the devastating shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut , which left 20 children and a reported seven adults dead, guns have become a focus in a state that’s usually far from the glare of the broader gun control debate. When one thinks of Connecticut—a firmly liberal state—it’s a safe bet that firearms aren’t the first things that come to mind. While other states have bigger gun-toting reputations (remember when Texas governor Rick Perry shot a coyote while jogging?), the Nutmeg State’s relationship with guns is more subdued—though no less profound. As one of early America’s industrial centers, Connecticut was a hotbed of weapons manufacturing—so much so that it was referred to in the 19th century as the “Arsenal of America.” In 1851, Samuel Colt, inventor of the revolver, built a factory on a parcel of land on the banks of the Connecticut River near Hartford. The legendary saying attached to Colt was “Abe Lincoln may have freed a

The gunman who killed 20 children and six adults at a school in Connecticut used a rifle as his main weapon, the chief medical examiner says. All the victims at Sandy Hook school in Newtown died of gunshot wounds, H Wayne Carver II said. A list of the dead has been released . All the children were aged six or seven, and all the adults were women. The gunman, named in media reports as Adam Lanza, killed his mother before driving to the school and opening fire. Head teacher Dawn Hochsprung is listed among the dead, along with adults Rachel DaVino, Anne Marie Murphy, Lauren Russo, Mary Sherlach and Victoria Soto. Read the full story here.

  As some Canadian industries struggle to find skilled workers, others face a glut of qualified candidates and not enough jobs to go around. University professor Peter Fragiskatos says emphasising the importance of a university education only makes the problem worse. Last week, Canadians were told what many of them already suspected, in a report filled with bad news and a very subtle silver lining. According to its author, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) deputy chief economist Benjamin Tal, Canada's economy faces a major skills shortage. An estimated 30% of businesses have difficulty filling positions because they cannot find qualified individuals - a number that doubles the 2010 rate. Most of the gaps are in mining, engineering (civil, chemical, electrical and mechanical) and health care (doctors, nurses, dentists, optometrists, pharmacists and dieticians are all mentioned). The problem is most serious in Saskatchewan, On

America is changing in ways that are important and unsettling for the future of American democracy; and America's elected officials and democracy experts seemingly are too politically timid or too theoretically limited to sound the alarm. However, candidly examining the realities and vulnerabilities of American democracy is an uncomfortable but necessary enterprise. Election 2012 and the looming legacy stage of the Obama presidency provide timely impetus and urgency to such inquiry. As Fareed Zakaria explains in The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (2007): Silenced by fears of being branded "antidemocratic" we have no way to understand what might be troubling about the ever-increasing democratization of our lives. We assume that no problem could ever be caused by democracy, so when we see social, political, and economic maladies we shift blame here and there, deflecting problems, avoiding answers, but never talking about