Seventy years ago next week — at 4:45 a.m. Sept. 1, 1939, to be precise — the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein began to shell the Polish military base near Gdansk. For Germans, for Poles, and for the British and French, who immediately declared war on Germany, that was the beginning of World War II.
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.
It’s a fact: Nothing happens in August. A curtain of heat descends across the Northern Hemisphere. Shops close. Congress goes home.
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?
“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 …
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, …
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 …
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, …
Like a contemporary reincarnation of Adela Quest, the heroine of E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India, James Palmer was both attracted and repelled by his first encounter with the grotesque, grimacing, wooden gods of Inner Mongolia: “I entered the shrine of a gruesome god, his sharp teeth grinning and his head festooned with skulls. I …
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.
