Author Archives: Alexander Starre

Studying abroad is like starting a new life. You arrive at a school far away from your home country, and at first you don’t know anybody. That’s what it felt like when I left Germany in the fall to start my study-abroad year at UCLA. With my stay in California now coming to an end, […]

Here’s what the history books might say about the U.S. war on Iraq: About a month after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration started to plan for a war against Iraq under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. To garner the support of the American public for this enterprise, the administration constructed […]

What if they held elections and nobody came? Los Angeles will find out today, as the mayoral runoff election will most likely only attract about one-fourth of the eligible voters. The 26 percent turnout in the March primaries marked a 16-year low for a mayoral election in Los Angeles. Democracy is probably not going to […]

Lynndie England grew up in Fort Ashby, W. Va., as the daughter of a railway worker before joining the U.S. Army and being deployed to Iraq. In South Africa’s Sunday Times, a Fort Ashby resident described the mentality in her hometown ““ “To the country boys here, if you’re a different nationality, a different race, […]

Cable TV producers are running scared these days. At least that’s what a $250 million ad campaign running since May 1 suggests. The reason? Indecency on their programs. Ever since that infamous Super Bowl incident last year, legislators and the Federal Communications Commission have gone after the broadcast and cable industries like puritanical hound dogs. […]

The weight problems of the people of the United States vanished overnight last week. At least that’s what a study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Cancer Institute indicates. Published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the study compared mortality rates of Americans with their body mass […]

This past Tuesday, white smoke rose over the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Since that moment, a new pope has presided over the more than 1 billion members of the Catholic Church. Now that the smoke has cleared, it’s worthwhile to take a close look at the new Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Joseph Ratzinger. I for […]