Which world leader has the biggest headache caused by the death of Osama bin-Laden? That would have to be General Ashfaq Kayani, commander of Pakistan’s military and, as such, the most powerful man in the country where al-Qaeda’s fugitive leader had been hiding in plain sight.
Kayani now faces an escalation of the already crisis-level …
Before leaving for a vacation in South Africa in December of 2001, my editor asked me to prepare an obituary for Osama bin Laden for TIME.com on the assumption that he might well be killed in Afghanistan while I was on the beach in Cape Town. Almost ten years later there was finally a reason to call up the old file: President Barack …
Caught in the warm afterglow of royal nuptials, Global Spin’s weekly guide to rental movies to bring you up to speed with the week’s events takes another tilt at all things monarchical. Presented by Tony Karon and Ishaan Tharoor.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8nD2KB0a_E]
The Queen
Helen Mirren’s stately journey into …
Anyone paying a modicum of attention to Israeli-Palestinian issues knows that the reason there’s little prospect of progress in negotiations between the two sides is not the decision by President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party to form a unity government with Hamas. Negotiations have been deadlocked because of the chasm between the two sides …
The current priority of the Obama Administration’s Middle East peace policy is to prevent the Palestinian leadership seeking UN recognition of Palestinian sovereignty over all of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But evidence is mounting that the Administration will fail, because even the moderate Palestinian Authority President …
Unable to assuage their grievances with empty promises of reform, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad this week adopted the “Tiananmen Model” of dealing with a popular protest movement. Like the Chinese authorities in 1989, Assad on Monday sent in the tanks and thousands of troops to reclaim the streets of Deraa, where the rebellion began …
A quick glance at the news from the real world and it’s not hard to see why the media-consuming public of the United States appears willing to lose itself in the fantastic miasma created by saturation coverage of the Disney-for-adults spectacle of a British royal wedding.
There’s nothing new about the decline of the erstwhile empire …
It might have once seemed safe to assume that facing a difficult reelection year, President Barack Obama would avoid any temptation to wade back into the perilous business of Middle East peacemaking. After all, his previous effort was blown out of the water by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to yield on the question …
The decision by Egypt’s current rulers to drag former President Hosni Mubarak and his sons into court next week to investigate allegations of corruption and abuses of power is certainly a crowd-pleaser: The demand for action against the leading lights of the ancien regime had been the key demand of the tens of thousands of protestors who …
The split in NATO over its Libya operation ought to come as no surprise: it’s precisely because of the differences within the alliance over the terms and goals of the mission, and the inevitably limiting effect of the alliance’s consensus-based decisionmaking, that France had been reluctant to cede command to NATO in the first place. But …
“From the very beginning we have been asking that the exit of Gaddafi and his sons take place immediately,” said Mustafa Abdul Jalil, leader of Libya’s rebel National Council on Monday, rejecting an African Union ‘roadmap’ to peace that had supposedly been accepted by Colonel Gaddafi. “We cannot consider this or any future proposal that …
That which has been obvious for some time now is finally being officially acknowledged: Libya’s power struggle is stalemated, and is likely to remain that way on the basis of the current level of NATO commitment. That was the grim assessment in congressional testimony Thursday by General Carter Ham, the U.S. commander who led the initial …
Judge Richard Goldstone’s Sunday op ed in the Washington Post reconsidering the allegation in his 2009 UN report that Israel had deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians in its 2008/9 Gaza war was greeted with premature euphoria in Israeli circles. Goldstone himself made clear, Wednesday, that he has no intention of withdrawing any …
