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PIERMONT — A short time after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo signed a letter to the federal government on Monday requesting federal help in building a new Tappan Zee Bridge, a shop owner asked me if I heard what the governor had said.

“When are they going to start?” he asked, just blocks away from all the pomp and the podium where one official after another touted moving forward with a new crossing....

The big proof of advances in gender equality isn’t the fact that the Augusta National Golf Club finally relented in accepting female members. The surer sign of women’s progress is that they’ve reached such high levels of prominence, from whence Augusta National members have always been plucked, that their presence at the club as members became inevitable.

Augusta National should have been...

Editorial cartoonists direct some dry wit on the hot weather and drought plaguing the United States this summer.

Click here to see a gallery of cartoons on the hot weather and drought conditions plaguing the United States this summer....

Remember earmarks?

They drove tea party types bonkers before Congress swore off the process (the House in 2010 the Senate in 2011) that enabled individual lawmakers to direct money to specific projects in their districts. Alaska’s notorious bridge to nowhere was the most infamous example.

Now there are idle earmarks — $473 million set aside as far back as 2003 for infrastructure projects...

When the Dixie Chicks criticized the president in 2003, they at least chose to do it out of George W. Bush's territory…and not in a place of worship.

The three members of female punk rock group Pussy Riot were sentenced Friday to two years in prison in Moscow after they "committed hooliganism driven by religious hatred." What they really did was protest the impending election of...

It may not get you pregnant, but it's still not risk-free.

More than two-thirds of today's kids have engaged in oral sex, and the research suggests that teens don’t know the health risks. They see it as a safer course of action than vaginal intercourse.

A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control of nearly 10,000 men and women ages 15 to 24 revealed that while teenage sexual conduct...

The latest twist in the strange case of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is that Ecuador has decided to grant him asylum. Of course there are no prospects of his reaching that country, since Assange is holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London just now and British authorities have no intention of letting him ride the tube out to Heathrow.

What a farce. Assange has done everything humanly...

Republicans’ insistence that their efforts to erect road blocks to voting are all about preventing fraud can’t explain away the skulduggery they tried in Ohio.

Until they were shamed into backing off Wednesday, they’d created a situation where people who live in counties that Republicans carried in 2008 could cast early ballots on evenings and weekends starting in October while people living...