The Guardian (London)

U.S. Supreme court confirmations are a good time to reflect on some basic precepts of our "separation of powers" system of government. Like previous nominees, Sonia Sotomayor faced the Senate judiciary committee's firing squad, as partisan tensions played out over lifetime appointment to a court that has no retirement age. At 54 years of age, Sotomayor, whose nomination the full Senate votes on today, easily could serve for three decades.

Peter Bergen, an expert on intelligence at the New America Foundation, said that the CIA is not likely to be put through the wringer in quite the way it was in the 1970s when senator Frank Church's committee laid bare an array of illegal activities. But the agency will have to account for recent actions.

Look, it took the Israelis 15 years to find Eichmann," says Peter Bergen, a journalist, terrorism expert and one of the few westerners to have actually met Bin Laden - he interviewed him in 1997. His personal guess is that the Saudi construction heir ...

"There are these two countries that the world blames for doing nothing, and they have a better story to tell," said Terry Tamminen, who took part in the talks and is an environmental adviser to the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. ...

New America president Steve Coll lauded Miliband as one who had embraced the new technologies in the service of pubic discourse. On a horizontally split screen, the face of New America innovation guru Steve Clemons, director of the foundation's American Strategy Program, occupied the upper portion via Skype from a perch in Berlin

What's more, it would represent a welcome break from the never-ending, futile bilateral talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that constituted Bush's failed Annapolis process. But there is a danger. The US-based analyst Daniel Levy warns ...

Or it might include a watered-down version of a public sector plan that isn't too competitive, something that the New America Foundation's Len Nichols has recommended. Yet the entire rationale for offering a public-sector plan is that it would give ...

"People say that Europe is probably behind the (United States) in getting into recession but will take a lot longer also to get out of it," Jasser told a conference on US-Saudi relations co-hosted by the New America Foundation. "So in relative terms, ...

Few outside of Argentina remember him, but a good man died yesterday. Raul Alfonsin was the first democratically elected president of the Argentine Republic after seven years of military rule in which over 10,000 Argentinians were "disappeared" by the military in a "Dirty War" against leftist guerrillas.

Steve Clemons, a director at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think-tank that favours ending the ban, today predicted that passage through Congress was more likely next year than this. Mel Martinez, a Republican senator from Florida, ...