August 19th, 2009
It minced no words, the Taliban, in the leaflets that it scattered across southern Afghanistan last weekend. In one of the missives, the Taliban threatened to cut off the noses and ears of anyone who dared to vote in Thursday’s presidential election. Read on »
August 11th, 2009
It’s a fact: Nothing happens in August. A curtain of heat descends across the Northern Hemisphere. Shops close. Congress goes home. Read on »
August 4th, 2009
Two years ago, someone called up Arthur Bloom with an unusual request: A badly wounded soldier, a former drummer, wanted to start playing music again. Trouble was, he’d lost a leg in Iraq and couldn’t use his old drum kit. Did Bloom have any ideas? Read on »
July 27th, 2009
“It’s time for Barack Obama to let Hillary Clinton take off her burqa.” It’s a line that brilliantly managed to belittle our female secretary of state under the guise of supporting her, to offend her and “defend” her at the same time: No wonder the insult that Tina Brown lobbed at the White House two weeks ago continues to echo around Washington. Read on »
July 13th, 2009
Two headlines caught my eye last week. “Summit Leaders in Climate Deal” read the one on the front page of the Wall Street Journal Europe. Above it was a picture of 10 smiling heads of state—the leaders of the G8 plus China and India. Below was an article that in contradiction to the cheerful photograph, described how the world’s political leaders had failed, once again, to halt climate change by decree. Read on »
July 9th, 2009
Forget the nuke deal, forget the speech, forget even the Russians’ lack of interest in Michelle: The real surprise of President Obama’s trip to Moscow this week was that he spent most of his time talking to the Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, and took only a couple of hours to pay a courtesy call on the Russian prime minister and former president, Vladimir Putin. Read on »
July 6th, 2009
Even though I live in an obscure corner of Eastern Europe, I recognize that it is impossible to escape the assumption that, by writing in this space, I belong to the “mainstream media.” I therefore feel it incumbent upon me to respond to Sarah Palin’s Fourth of July Facebook message, in which, among other things, she attacked the “main stream [sic] media” for their reaction to her surprise announcement that she would resign as governor of Alaska — a reaction that, she wrote, “has been most predictable, ironic, and as always, detached from the lives of ordinary Americans who are sick of the ‘politics of personal destruction.’ ” Read on »
June 30th, 2009
RABAT — If you want an antidote to the photographs of police officers beating demonstrators and girls dying on the streets of the Iranian capital, take a drive through the streets of the Moroccan capital. Read on »
June 23rd, 2009
Women in sunglasses and headscarves, speaking through megaphones, brandishing cameras, carrying signs: When they first appeared, the photographs of the 2005 Tehran University women’s rights protests were a powerful reminder of the true potential of Iranian women. The images were uplifting; they featured women of many ages; and they went on circulating long after the protests themselves died down. Now they have been replaced by a far more brutal and already infamous set of images: The photographs and video taken this past weekend of a young Iranian woman, allegedly shot by a government sniper, dying on the streets of Tehran. Read on »
June 15th, 2009
Once upon a time, “democracy” was a synonym for motherhood and apple pie, a thing of unchallengeable value. More recently, the word has lost its luster. The Bush administration spoke a lot about democracy in principle but found democratic ideas, not to mention democratic institutions, hard to promote in practice. Worse, some of its efforts had unsatisfactory results. Read on »