Quiz question: Who is applying to the United Nations for membership of a Palestinian state not-yet-born? Is it
a) the Palestinian Authority, or
b) the Palestine Liberation Organization?
Much of the media reporting treats the two as if they were interchangeable labels for the same thing — hardly surprising, perhaps, given …
U.S. presidents have reason to not relish decisions on selling arms to Taiwan. Say yes, as Barack Obama did in January 2010, when he approved the sale of $6.4 billion worth of equipment including Patriot air defense missiles, Black Hawk helicopters and two Osprey mine-hunting ships, and you anger China. China considers Taiwan to be …
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights concluded this week what just about everyone in the western hemisphere already knew: leading Venezuelan opposition politician Leopoldo López was denied due process of law in 2008, when socialist President Hugo Chávez’s government barred him from running in elections for six years because …
The Dead Sea came briefly to life on Saturday, as 1,200 Israelis shed their clothes and posed with their arms at their sides for the American photographer Spencer Tunick, whose business is making art from public nudity on a mass scale.
The idea was to draw attention to the steady decline of the famously salty lake, which exposes …
The U.S. State Department announced yesterday that it had “designated the Indian Mujahideen as a Foreign Terrorist Organization,” a decision that makes it illegal under U.S. law to provide material support or resources to the group, and freezes all its assets in the U.S. The new designation may not, by itself, make much difference in …
The Obama Administration is flailing — and failing — in its eleventh-hour efforts to stop a U.N. vote on Palestinian statehood next week. It’s as if Washington has woken in a panic after sleeping through its diplomatic alarm clock, and discovering that it has missed history’s bus. The Administration has dispatched delegations of …
One of the great surprises about the widespread crackdown on dissent in China this spring was how many of those who were detained and later released have remained quiet. While the experiences of a few who were detained, such as the artist Ai Weiwei, did emerge, little is known about what was endured by many of the more than 100 …
On Sept. 13 the BBC’s main evening news flashed up a TIME cover. There’s nothing particularly unusual in our stories making headlines in other media, but this was more than three years after publication. The story in question, about why Britons appear scared of their kids, and to what extent they’re right to be so, provoked comment and …
Among the list of food safety scandals that have plagued China in recent years—toxic infant formula, pesticide-tainted vegetables, exploding watermelons, “lean meat powder” and pork reconstituted as beef—few are quite as stomach churning as the nauseatingly-named “gutter oil.” It involves, as the name implies, the resale of used …
As a raucous mob of protestors on Friday stormed past passive Egyptian policemen, breaching the wall around Israel’s Cairo embassy and sacking the unsecured parts of the building, Israel turned for help to the Obama Administration. Looking to the U.S. to shield it from international opprobrium has become a familiar pattern for Israel …
Not to generalize, but in Gaza it’s said to be possible to estimate the political sympathies of the person approaching on the sidewalk without actually asking. A woman in a snug cloak, hair covered in a scarf of fuscia or some colorful print is likely aligned with Fatah, the secular Palestinian party. While a woman who understands …
There are several reasons one might have chosen to attend the Sept. 8 press conference at the Frankfurt headquarters of the European Central Bank: to find out what the ECB had decided on interest rates (the bank held its benchmark interest rate at 1.5%) or how it had revised its growth forecasts (down to 1.6% from 1.9% in 2011 and …
During his first year in office, President George W. Bush was confronted by the key strategic challenge facing the United States in the new century, in an incident that began with the diversion of a U.S. aircraft — by Chinese fighter planes, which forced a U.S. Navy spy plane to land on the island of Hainan after a collision that …
