acmonk

“A court in country X sentenced a black man who had been severely beaten by white men to six months in jail and 200 lashes.” How would you react if you read that in a newspaper?

If for nothing else, we should be grateful to John and Anne Darwin for bringing the excellent word “pseudocide” back into wider public use. For those who don’t follow the British press as closely as they should, John Darwin is a canoeist who paddled off into the North Sea in 2002 and was presumed dead …

A Vanishing Fantasy Read More »

What do a British novel, a papal speech, some Danish cartoons and a Dutch movie have in common with . . . a teddy bear? If that sounds like the beginning of an elaborate after-dinner-speech joke, it isn’t.

In the photographs of his arrest, Garry Kasparov — former world chess champion, current Russian opposition leader — is wearing a nondescript gray jacket and a somewhat retro wool cap. He is gloveless.

Casualties are definitely down. Other places suddenly seem to need more urgent attention. News coverage is shrinking, as is public interest. All of which may help explain the breath of optimism one can now detect in Washington, and even in other places, about the war in Iraq.

The French Revolution had its Jacobins; the Russian Revolution erupted in Red Terror. The peaceful revolutions of more recent years weren’t supposed to produce violent counterrevolutions. But now one of them has.

Ninety years ago this week, a Bolshevik mob stormed the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, arrested the provisional government and installed a “dictatorship of the proletariat.”

Admittedly, the divorce was one step too far. But right up until the French first couple announced their permanent separation, I was rooting like mad for Cècilia Sarkozy. At last, a prominent wife of a prominent politician who did not pretend to be totally absorbed by her husband’s career!