Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is an American attorney and politician who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, he was the first African American, he served as a U. S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008. Obama was born in Hawaii. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, he worked as a community organizer in Chicago. In 1988, he enrolled in Harvard Law School, where he was the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating, he became a civil rights attorney and an academic, teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004, he represented the 13th district for three terms in the Illinois Senate from 1997 until 2004 when he ran for the U. S. Senate, he received national attention in 2004 with his March primary win, his well-received July Democratic National Convention keynote address, his landslide November election to the Senate. In 2008, he was nominated for president a year after his campaign began and after a close primary campaign against Hillary Clinton.
He was elected over Republican John McCain and was inaugurated on January 20, 2009. Nine months he was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Regarded as a centrist New Democrat, Obama signed many landmark bills into law during his first two years in office; the main reforms that were passed include the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, Job Creation Act of 2010 served as economic stimulus amidst the Great Recession. After a lengthy debate over the national debt limit, he signed the Budget Control and the American Taxpayer Relief Acts. In foreign policy, he increased U. S. troop levels in Afghanistan, reduced nuclear weapons with the United States–Russia New START treaty, ended military involvement in the Iraq War. He ordered military involvement in Libya in opposition to Muammar Gaddafi.
He ordered the military operations that resulted in the deaths of Osama bin Laden and suspected Yemeni Al-Qaeda operative Anwar al-Awlaki. After winning re-election by defeating Republican opponent Mitt Romney, Obama was sworn in for a second term in 2013. During this term, he promoted inclusiveness for LGBT Americans, his administration filed briefs that urged the Supreme Court to strike down same-sex marriage bans as unconstitutional. He advocated for gun control in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, indicating support for a ban on assault weapons, issued wide-ranging executive actions concerning climate change and immigration. In foreign policy, he ordered military intervention in Iraq in response to gains made by ISIL after the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq, continued the process of ending U. S. combat operations in Afghanistan in 2016, promoted discussions that led to the 2015 Paris Agreement on global climate change, initiated sanctions against Russia following the invasion in Ukraine and again after Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections, brokered a nuclear deal with Iran, normalized U.
S. relations with Cuba. During his term in office, America's reputation in global polling improved. Evaluations of his presidency among historians, political scientists, the general public place him among the upper tier of American presidents. Obama left office and retired in January 2017 and resides in Washington, D. C. A December 2018 Gallup poll found Obama to be the most admired man in America for an unprecedented 11th consecutive year, although Dwight D. Eisenhower was selected most admired in twelve non-consecutive years. Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children in Honolulu, Hawaii, he is the only president, born outside of the contiguous 48 states. He was born to a black father, his mother, Ann Dunham, was born in Kansas. His father, Barack Obama Sr. was a Luo Kenyan from Nyang'oma Kogelo. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian language class at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where his father was a foreign student on a scholarship; the couple married in Hawaii, on February 2, 1961, six months before Obama was born.
In late August 1961, Barack and his mother moved to the University of Washington in Seattle, where they lived for a year. During that time, the elder Obama completed his undergraduate degree in economics in Hawaii, graduating in June 1962, he left to attend graduate school on a scholarship at Harvard University, where he earned an M. A. in economics. Obama's parents divorced in March 1964. Obama Sr. returned to Kenya in 1964, where he married for a third time and worked for the Kenyan government as the Senior Economic Analyst in the Ministry of Finance. He visited his son in Hawaii only once, at Christmas time in 1971, before he was killed in an automobile accident in 1982, when Obama was 21 years old. Recalling his early childhood, Obama said, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me – that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk – registered in my mind." He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multira
USA Today
USA Today is an internationally distributed American daily, middle-market newspaper that serves as the flagship publication of its owner, the Gannett Company. The newspaper has a centrist audience. Founded by Al Neuharth on September 15, 1982, it operates from Gannett's corporate headquarters on Jones Branch Drive, in McLean, Virginia, it is printed at five additional sites internationally. Its dynamic design influenced the style of local and national newspapers worldwide, through its use of concise reports, colorized images, informational graphics, inclusion of popular culture stories, among other distinct features. With a weekly circulation of 1,021,638 and an approximate daily reach of seven million readers as of 2016, USA Today shares the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States with The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. USA Today is distributed in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, an international edition is distributed in Asia, Canada and the Pacific Islands.
The genesis of USA Today was on February 29, 1980, when a company task force known as "Project NN" met with Gannett Company chairman Al Neuharth in Cocoa Beach, Florida to develop a national newspaper. Early regional prototypes included East Bay Today, an Oakland, California-based publication published in the late 1970s to serve as the morning edition of the Oakland Tribune, an afternoon newspaper which Gannett owned at the time. On June 11, 1981, Gannett printed the first prototypes of the proposed publication; the two proposed design layouts were mailed to newsmakers and prominent leaders in journalism, for review and feedback. The Gannett Company's board of directors approved the launch of the national newspaper, titled USA Today, on December 5, 1981. At launch, Neuharth was appointed president and publisher of the newspaper, adding those responsibilities to his existing position as Gannett's chief executive officer. Gannett announced the launch of the paper on April 20, 1982. USA Today began publishing on September 15, 1982 in the Baltimore and Washington, D.
C. metropolitan areas for an newsstand price of 25¢. After selling out the first issue, Gannett expanded the national distribution of the paper, reaching an estimated circulation of 362,879 copies by the end of 1982, double the amount of sales that Gannett projected; the design uniquely incorporated color graphics and photographs. Only its front news section pages were rendered in four-color, while the remaining pages were printed in a spot color format; the paper's overall style and elevated use of graphics – developed by Neuharth, in collaboration with staff graphics designers George Rorick, Sam Ward, Suzy Parker, John Sherlock and Web Bryant – was derided by critics, who referred to it as "McPaper" or "television you can wrap fish in," because it opted to incorporate concise nuggets of information more akin to the style of television news, rather than in-depth stories like traditional newspapers, which many in the newspaper industry considered to be a dumbing down of the news. Although USA Today had been profitable for just ten years as of 1997, it changed the appearance and feel of newspapers around the world.
On July 2, 1984, the newspaper switched from predominantly black-and-white to full color photography and graphics in all four sections. The next week on July 10, USA Today launched an international edition intended for U. S. readers abroad, followed four months on October 8 with the rollout of the first transmission via satellite of its international version to Singapore. On April 8, 1985, the paper published its first special bonus section, a 12-page section called "Baseball'85," which previewed the 1985 Major League Baseball season. By the fourth quarter of 1985, USA Today had become the second largest newspaper in the United States, reaching a daily circulation of 1.4 million copies. Total daily readership of the paper by 1987 had reached 5.5 million, the largest of any daily newspaper in the U. S. On May 6, 1986, USA Today began production of its international edition in Switzerland. USA Today operated at a loss for most of its first four years of operation, accumulating a total deficit of $233 million after taxes, according to figures released by Gannett in July 1987.
On January 29, 1988, USA Today published the largest edition in its history, a 78-page weekend edition featuring a section previewing Super Bowl XXII. On April 15, USA Today launched a third international printing site, based in Hong Kong; the international edition set circulation and advertising records during August 1988, with coverage of the 1988 Summer Olympics, selling more than 60,000 copies and 100 pages of advertising. By July 1991, Simmons Market Research Bureau estimated that USA Today had a total daily readership of nearly 6.6 million, an all-time high and the largest readership of any daily newspaper in the United States. On September 1 of that year, USA Today launched a fourth printsite for its international edition in London for the United Kingdom and the British Isles; the international edition's schedule was changed as of April 1, 1994 Monday through Friday, rather than from Tuesday through Saturday, in order to accommodate business travelers.
Michele Bachmann
Michele Marie Bachmann is an American politician and a member of the Republican Party. She represented Minnesota's 6th congressional district in the United States House of Representatives from 2007 to 2015; the district includes several of the northern suburbs of the Twin Cities. Bachmann was a candidate for the Republican nomination in the 2012 U. S. presidential election, winning the Ames Straw Poll in August 2011 but dropping out in January 2012 after finishing in sixth place in the Iowa caucuses. She served in the Minnesota Senate and is the first Republican woman to represent the state in Congress, she is a founder of the House Tea Party Caucus. Bachmann was born Michele Marie Amble in Waterloo, Iowa, "into a family of Norwegian Lutheran Democrats". After her parents divorced, Bachmann's father, David John Amble, moved to California, Bachmann was raised by her mother, Arlene Jean, who worked at the First National Bank in Anoka, Minnesota, her mother remarried. She graduated from Anoka High School in 1974 and, after graduation, spent one summer working on kibbutz Be'eri in Israel.
In 1978, she graduated from Winona State University with a B. A. In 1979, Bachmann was a member of the first class of the O. W. Coburn School of Law a part of Oral Roberts University. While there, Bachmann studied with John Eidsmoe, whom she described in 2011 as "one of the professors who had a great influence on me". Bachmann worked as a research assistant on Eidsmoe's 1987 book Christianity and the Constitution, which argues that the United States was founded as a Christian theocracy and should become one again. In 1986 Bachmann received a J. D. degree from Oral Roberts University. She was a member of the ORU law school's final graduating class, was part of a group of faculty and students who moved the ORU law school library to what is now Regent University. In 1988, Bachmann received an LL. M. degree in tax law from William & Mary Law School. From 1988 to 1993 she worked as an attorney for the Internal Revenue Service, she left the IRS to become a full-time mother. Michele Marie Amble was born in Waterloo, Iowa on April 6, 1956, to Norwegian-American parents David John Amble and "Arlene" Jean Amble.
One pair of her great-great-great grandparents and Martha Munson, left Sogndal in Norway and arrived in Wisconsin in 1857. She was still a young girl when her father, an engineer, moved the family to Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, she was 14 years old. Her father remarried and moved to California, young Michele and her mother Jean moved to Anoka, Minnesota, her mother remarried three years to widower Raymond J. LaFave. In 1978, she married Marcus Bachmann, now a clinical therapist with a master's degree from Regent University and a Ph. D. from Union Graduate School, whom she met while they were undergraduates. After she received an LL. M. in taxation from William & Mary School of Law in 1988, the couple moved to Stillwater, Minnesota, a town of 18,000 near Saint Paul, where they run a Christian counseling center that provided gay conversion therapy. Bachmann and her husband have five children: Lucas, Elisa and Sophia. Bachmann said in a 2011 town hall meeting that she suffered a miscarriage after the birth of their second child, Harrison, an event she said shaped her pro-life views.
Bachmann and her husband have provided foster care to 23 other children, all teenage girls. The Bachmanns were licensed from 1992 to 2000 to handle up to three foster children at a time; the Bachmanns began by providing short-term care for girls with eating disorders who were patients in a University of Minnesota program. The Bachmann home was defined as a treatment home, with a daily reimbursement rate per child from the state; some girls stayed others more than a year. She is a former beauty pageant queen. In May 2012, it was reported that Marcus Bachmann had registered for Swiss citizenship and after it was finalized, Michele Bachmann automatically became a citizen as well; the Bachmanns and their three youngest children were granted citizenship on March 19, 2012. They had been eligible for this under Swiss nationality law because Marcus Bachmann's parents were Swiss. Bachmann denied that she or her husband had applied for Swiss citizenship, saying that her husband had been a dual citizen as the son of Swiss immigrants, that she had automatically acquired Swiss citizenship under then-current Swiss law when she married him in 1978.
But in May 2012, when a Swiss Television reporter said to her "I understand you just got Swiss citizenship", Bachmann's reply was: "Yes, we did." Marcus Bachmann did not register the marriage with the Swiss authorities until 2012. Within two days of the first reports of Bachmann's dual citizenship, she announced that she had written to the Swiss consulate to have her Swiss citizenship withdrawn. Bachmann was a longtime member of Salem Lutheran Church in Stillwater, she and her husband withdrew their membership on June 21, 2011, just before she began her presidential campaign. They had not attended the church for over two years. More according to friends, the Bachmanns began attending Eagle Brook Church, an Evangelical Protestant Baptist church closer to their home. Bachmann has cited theologian Francis Schaeffer as a "profound influence" on her life and her husband's his film series How Should We Then Live?. She has described
Ron Reagan
Ronald Prescott Reagan is an American former radio host and political analyst for KIRO radio and Air America Radio, where he hosted his own daily three-hour show. He is a contributor to programming on the MSNBC cable news and commentary network, his liberal views contrast those of his late father, Republican United States President Ronald Reagan. Reagan was born and raised in Los Angeles, the son of Ronald Reagan and his second wife, Nancy Davis Reagan; the family lived in Sacramento while his father was governor, from 1967 to 1975. His sister, Patti Davis, is five and a half years older, his elder brother Michael Reagan, adopted as an infant by Ronald Reagan and his first wife Jane Wyman, is 13 years older. He had two half-sisters born to Reagan and Wyman, Maureen Reagan and Christine Reagan, born prematurely, on June 26, 1947, died the same day. At an early age, his father, Ronald Reagan joked that they were related to every royal family with the name O'Regan in Europe. Burke's Peerage provided the Reagans with their family tree, which lacked any direct connection to European royalty.
Ron Reagan undertook a different political path from his father at an early age. At 12, he told his parents. Reagan was expelled from The Webb School of California, he commented: They thought I was a bad influence on the other kids. As I recall, the immediate reason was I went to a dance at a neighboring girl's school in a classmate's car; this was an infraction. They had been looking for an excuse. I didn't get caught at anything. Reagan dropped out of Yale University in 1976 after one semester to become a ballet dancer, he joined the Joffrey Ballet in pursuit of his lifelong dream and participated in the Joffrey II Dancers, a troupe for beginning dancers, where he was mentored by Sally Brayley. Time wrote in 1980: "It is known that Ron's parents have not managed to see a single ballet performance of their son, very good, having been selected to the Joffrey second company, is their son nonetheless. Ron talks of his parents with much affection, but these absences are strange and go back a ways." Reagan and Nancy went to see Ron perform at the Lisner Auditorium on Monday, May 18, 1981.
The elder Reagan commented in his White House diary on this day that Ron's performance was reminiscent of Fred Astaire. Reagan became more politically active after his father left the White House in 1989. In contrast to his father, the younger Reagan's views were unabashedly liberal. In a 2009 Vanity Fair interview, Ron said that he did not speak out politically during his father's term because the press "never cared about my opinions as such, only as they related to him", adding that he did not want to create the impression that he and his father were on bad terms because of political differences. In 1991, Reagan hosted The Ron Reagan Show, a syndicated late-night talk show addressing political issues of the day, canceled after a brief run since it was unable to compete with the higher ratings of The Arsenio Hall Show, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Nightline. Reagan has worked in recent years as a magazine journalist, has hosted talk shows on cable TV networks such as the Animal Planet network.
In Britain, he is best known for having co-presented Record Breakers for the BBC. Reagan presented a report from the United States each week, he has served on the board of the Creative Coalition, an organization founded in 1989 by a group that included Susan Sarandon and Christopher Reeve, to politically mobilize entertainers and artists for First Amendment rights, causes such as arts advocacy and public education. From February to December 2005, Reagan co-hosted the talk show Connected: Coast to Coast with Monica Crowley on MSNBC; until its demise in 2010, Air America Media aired The Ron Reagan Show. The program made its debut on September 8, 2008. In 2011, he published My Father at 100: A Memoir. In interviews promoting the book, Reagan described noticing his father was having certain mental lapses which, in hindsight, caused the younger Reagan to speculate subsequently that his father may have been in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease while still in office; this assertion was attacked by critics, including Michael Reagan.
Ron Reagan subsequently clarified that he did not feel the lapses were evidence of "dementia." In July 2004, Reagan spoke at the Democratic National Convention about his support for lifting Bush's restrictions on federally funded embryonic stem cell research, from which he expected a cure or new treatments for Alzheimer's disease, of which his father had died. "There are those who would stand in the way of this remarkable future, who would deny the federal funding so crucial to basic research. A few of these folks, needless to say, are just grinding a political axe and they should be ashamed of themselves," Ron Reagan said of the restrictions. "We can choose between the future and the past, between reason and ignorance, between true compassion and mere ideology." Reagan's mother Nancy supported this position. In September 2004, he told the Sunday Herald newspaper that the George W. Bush Administration had "cheated to get into the White House. It's not something Americans want to think about their government.
My sense of these people is. They have a revolutionary mindset. I think they feel that anything they can do to prevail — lie, whatever — is justified by their revolutionary aims" and that he feared Bush was "hijacking" his father's reputation. Reagan wrote the essay "The Cas
Chicago Tribune
The Chicago Tribune is a daily newspaper based in Chicago, United States, owned by Tribune Publishing. Founded in 1847, self-styled as the "World's Greatest Newspaper", it remains the most-read daily newspaper of the Chicago metropolitan area and the Great Lakes region, it is the eighth-largest newspaper in the United States by circulation. Traditionally published as a broadsheet, on January 13, 2009, the Tribune announced it would continue publishing as a broadsheet for home delivery, but would publish in tabloid format for newsstand, news box, commuter station sales; this change, proved to be unpopular with readers and in August 2011, the Tribune discontinued the tabloid edition, returning to its traditional broadsheet edition through all distribution channels. The Tribune's masthead is notable for displaying the American flag, in reference to the paper's motto, "An American Paper for Americans"; the motto is no longer displayed on the masthead. The Tribune was founded by James Kelly, John E. Wheeler, Joseph K. C.
Forrest, publishing the first edition on June 10, 1847. Numerous changes in ownership and editorship took place over the next eight years; the Tribune was not politically affiliated, but tended to support either the Whig or Free Soil parties against the Democrats in elections. By late 1853, it was running xenophobic editorials that criticized foreigners and Roman Catholics. About this time it became a strong proponent of temperance; however nativist its editorials may have been, it was not until February 10, 1855 that the Tribune formally affiliated itself with the nativist American or Know Nothing party, whose candidate Levi Boone was elected Mayor of Chicago the following month. By about 1854, part-owner Capt. J. D. Webster General Webster and chief of staff at the Battle of Shiloh, Dr. Charles H. Ray of Galena, through Horace Greeley, convinced Joseph Medill of Cleveland's Leader to become managing editor. Ray became editor-in-chief, Medill became the managing editor, Alfred Cowles, Sr. brother of Edwin Cowles was the bookkeeper.
Each purchased one third of the Tribune. Under their leadership, the Tribune distanced itself from the Know Nothings, became the main Chicago organ of the Republican Party. However, the paper continued to print anti-Catholic and anti-Irish editorials, in the wake of the massive Famine immigration from Ireland; the Tribune absorbed three other Chicago publications under the new editors: the Free West in 1855, the Democratic Press of William Bross in 1858, the Chicago Democrat in 1861, whose editor, John Wentworth, left his position when elected as Mayor of Chicago. Between 1858 and 1860, the paper was known as the Chicago Tribune. On October 25, 1860, it became the Chicago Daily Tribune. Before and during the American Civil War, the new editors supported Abraham Lincoln, whom Medill helped secure the presidency in 1860, pushed an abolitionist agenda; the paper remained a force in Republican politics for years afterwards. In 1861, the Tribune published new lyrics by William W. Patton for the song "John Brown's Body".
These rivaled the lyrics published two months by Julia Ward Howe. Medill served as mayor of Chicago for one term after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Under the 20th-century editorship of Colonel Robert R. McCormick, who took control in the 1920s, the paper was isolationist and aligned with the Old Right in its coverage of political news and social trends, it used the motto "The American Paper for Americans". Through the 1930s to the 1950s, it excoriated the Democrats and the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt, was resolutely disdainful of the British and French, enthusiastic for Chiang Kai-shek and Sen. Joseph McCarthy; when McCormick assumed the position of co-editor in 1910, the Tribune was the third-best-selling paper among Chicago's eight dailies, with a circulation of only 188,000. The young cousins added features such as advice columns and homegrown comic strips such as Little Orphan Annie and Moon Mullins, they promoted political "crusades", with their first success coming with the ouster of the Republican political boss of Illinois, Sen. William Lorimer.
At the same time, the Tribune competed with the Hearst paper, the Chicago Examiner, in a circulation war. By 1914, the cousins succeeded in forcing out Managing Editor William Keeley. By 1918, the Examiner was forced to merge with the Chicago Herald. In 1919, Patterson left the Tribune and moved to New York to launch his own newspaper, the New York Daily News. In a renewed circulation war with Hearst's Herald-Examiner, McCormick and Hearst ran rival lotteries in 1922; the Tribune won the battle. In 1922, the Chicago Tribune hosted an international design competition for its new headquarters, the Tribune Tower; the competition worked brilliantly as a publicity stunt, more than 260 entries were received. The winner was a neo-Gothic design by New York architects John Mead Howells and Raymond Hood; the newspaper sponsored a pioneering attempt at Arctic aviation in 1929, an attempted round-trip to Europe across Greenland and Iceland in a Sikorsky amphibious aircraft. But, the aircraft was destroyed by ice on July 15, 1929, near Ungava Bay at the tip of Labrador, Canada.
The crew were rescued by the Canadian science ship CSS Acadia. The Tribune's reputation for innovation extended to radio—it bought an early station, WDAP, in 1924 and renamed it WGN, the station call letters standing for the paper's self-description as the "Worl
Iraq War
The Iraq War was a protracted armed conflict that began in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq by a United States-led coalition that overthrew the government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict continued for much of the next decade as an insurgency emerged to oppose the occupying forces and the post-invasion Iraqi government. An estimated 151,000 to 600,000 or more Iraqis were killed in the first three to four years of conflict. In 2009, official US troops were withdrawn, but American soldiers continued to remain on the ground fighting in Iraq, hired by defence contractors and private military companies; the U. S. became re-involved in 2014 at the head of a new coalition. The invasion occurred as part of a declared war against international terrorism and its sponsors under the administration of U. S. President George W. Bush following the unrelated September 11 terrorist attacks. In October 2002, President Bush obtained congressional approval from a Democrat-led Senate and Republican-led House authorizing war-making powers.
The Iraq war began on 19 March 2003, when the U. S. joined by the U. K. and several coalition allies, launched a "awe" bombing campaign. Iraqi forces were overwhelmed as U. S. forces swept through the country. The invasion led to the collapse of the Ba'athist government. However, the power vacuum following Saddam's demise and the mismanagement of the occupation led to widespread sectarian violence between Shias and Sunnis, as well as a lengthy insurgency against U. S. and coalition forces. Many violent insurgent groups were supported by al-Qaeda in Iraq; the United States responded with a troop surge in 2007, a build up of 170,000 troops. The surge in troops gave greater security to Iraq’s government and military, was a success; the winding down of U. S. involvement in Iraq accelerated under President Barack Obama. The U. S. formally withdrew all combat troops from Iraq by December 2011. However, with no stay-behind agreement or advisers left in Iraq, a new power vacuum was created and led to the rise of ISIS.
Nine months after President Trump was elected, U. S.-backed forces captured Raqqa. The Bush administration based its rationale for the war principally on the assertion that Iraq, viewed by the U. S. as a rogue state since the 1990–1991 Gulf War, possessed weapons of mass destruction and that there was concern about an active WMD program, that the Iraqi government posed a threat to the United States and its coalition allies. Select U. S. officials accused Saddam of harbouring and supporting al-Qaeda, while others cited the desire to end a repressive dictatorship and bring democracy to the people of Iraq. Hundreds of chemical weapons were found in Iraq, which were determined to be produced before the 1991 Gulf War, intelligence officials determined they were "so old they couldn't be used as designed." From 2004 to 2011, US troops and American-trained Iraqi troops encountered, on six reported occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons from years earlier in Saddam Hussein's rule. 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs were discovered.
The rationale of U. S. pre-war intelligence faced heavy criticism both domestically and internationally. From 2009 to 2011, the UK conducted a broad inquiry into its decision to go to war chaired by Sir John Chilcot; the Chilcot Report, published in 2016, concluded military action may have been necessary but was not the last resort at the time and that the consequences of invasion were underestimated. In the aftermath of the invasion, Iraq held multi-party elections in 2005. Nouri al-Maliki became Prime Minister in 2006 and remained in office until 2014; the al-Maliki government enacted policies that were seen as having the effect of alienating the country's Sunni minority and worsening sectarian tensions. In the summer of 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant launched a military offensive in Northern Iraq and declared a worldwide Islamic caliphate, eliciting another military response from the United States and its allies; the Iraq War caused over a hundred thousand civilian deaths and tens of thousands of military deaths.
The majority of deaths occurred as a result of the insurgency and civil conflicts between 2004 and 2007. Strong international opposition to the Saddam Hussein regime began after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990; the international community condemned the invasion, in 1991 a military coalition led by the United States launched the Gulf War to expel Iraq from Kuwait. Following the Gulf War, the US and its allies tried to keep Saddam in check with a policy of containment; this policy involved numerous economic sanctions by the UN Security Council. The inspections were carried out by the United Nations Special Commission. UNSCOM, in cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, worked to ensure that Iraq destroyed its chemical and nuclear weapons and facilities. In the decade following the Gulf War, the United Nations passed 16 Security Council resolutions calling for the complete elimination of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Member states communicated their frustration over the years that Iraq was impeding the work of the special commission and failing to take its disarmament obligations.
Iraqi officials harass
Howard Fineman
Howard David Fineman is an American journalist, global editorial director of the AOL Huffington Post Media Group. Prior to his move to Huffington Post in October 2010, he was Newsweek's Chief Political Correspondent, Senior Editor and Deputy Washington Bureau Chief. An award-winning writer, Fineman is an NBC News analyst, contributing reports to the network and its cable affiliate MSNBC, he appears on Hardball with Chris Matthews, The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, The Rachel Maddow Show. The author of scores of Newsweek cover stories, Fineman's work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, his "Living Politics" column was posted weekly on Newsweek.com. Fineman authored his first book in 2008, The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country. Fineman was raised in a Jewish family in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, the son of Jean and Charles Fineman, both teachers. Fineman attended Colfax Elementary and Taylor Allderdice High School, graduating in 1966.
The family belonged to the Tree of Life – Or L'Simcha Congregation, where Fineman celebrated his bar mitzvah. Fineman holds a B. A. from Colgate University, where he was Phi Beta Kappa and a member of Beta Theta Pi, an M. S. in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a J. D. from the University of Louisville School of Law. His legal education included a year at the Georgetown University Law Center, he was a recipient of both the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship and the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship for study in Europe and the Middle East, he began his journalism career at The Louisville Courier-Journal, covering the environment, the coal industry and state politics before joining the newspaper's Washington bureau in 1978. He moved to Newsweek in 1980, was named Chief Political Correspondent in 1984, Deputy Washington Bureau Chief in 1993 and Senior Editor in 1995, he has become a regular guest on Tony Kornheiser's podcast offering political insight to Tony as well as Pittsburgh sports updates.
Tony refers to him as "The Intergalactic Editor of the Huffington Post". Fineman has focused in times of George W. Bush. A Newsweek cover story in November 2001 featured the president's first extensive post-9/11 interview. Fineman's other awards include a "Page One" from the Headliners Club of New York, a "Silver Gavel" from the American Bar Association, a "Deadline Club" from the Society of Professional Journalists. Fineman has written on the rise of the "religious right", the power of talk radio and politics, the Pledge of Allegiance controversy, he has interviewed business leaders such as Bill Gates, Steve Case, Steve Ballmer. He interviewed GOP operative Lee Atwater, in the documentary Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story. Fineman reports for NBC, has appeared on most major public affairs shows, he was a panelist on PBS's Washington Week in Review from 1983 to 1995, on CNN's Capital Gang from 1995 to 1998. Fineman holds honorary degrees from Colgate University, the University of Louisville Washington and Jefferson College, Gettysburg College Notes Appearances on C-SPAN
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