“Radio Free Europe? Does that still exist?” That was the question; the speaker was an Important Public Broadcaster, visiting Europe for a few days last week. It wasn’t a surprising query, as these things go, or an ignorant one. Not many other Americans know that Radio Free Europe still exists, so why should he?
In London, a man with a fire extinguisher hurled himself at a torch bearer using what one onlooker gleefully described as a “rugby tackle.”
Forty years after the murder of Martin Luther King, the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama has once again led America to search its soul.
Russland hat einen neuen Präsidenten. Doch das System seines Vorgängers lebt fort – und ist sogar zu einem Exportschlager geworden.
It can be a little wisp of fabric, nothing more. It comes in longer versions, shorter versions, versions that cover the hair, others that cover the face. According to Le Monde, you can even get a Viennese stylist to design one in the manner of “Catherine Zeta-Jones and Naomi Campbell,” with a whiff of supermodel …
Cellphone photographs and videos from Tibet, blurry and amateurish, are circulating on the Internet. Some show clouds of tear gas; others, burning buildings and shops; still others, monks in purple robes, riot police and confusion.
“We believe the Olympic Games are not the place for demonstrations, and we hope that all people attending the games recognize the importance of this.” Thus spoke Samsung Electronics, one of 12 major corporate sponsors of the Olympics, when asked last week whether recent events in Tibet were causing it any concern.
Thanks to chance and circumstance — because people left them, sent them, lent them — a trio of autobiographies landed on my desk last weekend: Valerie Plame’s “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House,” George Tenet’s “At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA” and Peter …
Last Wednesday, Dmitry Medvedev took a break from his job as deputy prime minister of Russia and held a public meeting. Dressed in shirtsleeves, he talked about pension reform, promised to improve education, shook a few hands.
As not everybody now remembers, the wars of Yugoslavia began not in Bosnia, not in Croatia, but in Kosovo. The chain of events that led to the Srebrenica massacre and the bombing of Belgrade started there, in the late 1980s, when Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic launched a series of repressive measures against this mostly Albanian, …
