Here’s our latest installment of five rental films to watch this weekend to get you up to speed with our week in news. Compiled by Ishaan Tharoor and Tony Karon.
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Carry On Up the Khyber
It’s a truth we’ve all read (and written about) for a while now: as grumpy as Washington …
Senator George Mitchell is no fool, so it should come as no surprise that he’s no longer prepared to undertake the fool’s-errand assignment of being President Barack Obama’s Special Envoy on Middle East peace. News that the 77-year-old retired senator who brokered the Northern Ireland peace agreement will on Friday resign the position …
Talking Torture — Sen. John McCain condemns the use of so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ in an important, if overwrought, op-ed for the Washington Post.
Common Ground — In Foreign Affairs Jonathan Kay explains why Americans should care about the Canadian election. His take: “Canada will align more closely with the …
Iran wants to talk, again, about the nuclear standoff with the West. Laura Rozen reports that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, has written to European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton to request another meeting. The last round of talks, held in January, was so frustrating to the Western …
Osama’s Irrelevance — The Taliban won’t miss bin Laden, observes Julius Cavendish in a dispatch from Kabul. The goals of Afghanistan’s insurgency are national, and even many Taliban leaders resented al-Qaeda’s presence on their turf.
Pots and Kettles — In an interview with the Atlantic, Hilary Clinton lashes out at China, calling …
Just as it seemed that top U.S. officials were publicly sending the same signals to China on human rights, namely that China should improve its record not just because it is morally right, but because it will help the Beijing government achieve its goal of social stability, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dropped a bombshell. In a …
If it’s May 10 in France, it must be François Mitterrand Day. Not officially, of course (while the nation has named a library, an embankment of the Seine, and other venues after the late president, it hasn’t gone so far as to honor him with an actual public holiday. Yet…). But anyone passing through France or perusing its national …
Israel bombing Iran could, indeed, be a spectacularly stupid idea, but does the Israeli public really need to hear that? That not-in-front-of-the-kids message seemed to be the gist of Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak’s criticism of Meir Dagan, recently retired head of the Mossad intelligence agency, who last week warned publicly that …
The lesson of Watergate—it’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover-up—isn’t covered on China’s driving test. But perhaps it should be. In recent months the Chinese public has been shocked by multiple cases of drivers killing accident victims in hopes of evading legal responsibilities.
The most famous incident …
Global Spin’s weekly menu of five rental movies to bring you up to speed with world events focuses on the only theme in this week’s headlines: The raid that killed Osama bin-Laden
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Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
White House squeamishness over …
Game of Thrones — As the world’s attention focuses on Pakistan, a fascinating power struggle is playing out in Iran between controversial President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the country’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Guardian reports that a number of prominent Ahmadinejad allies have been arrested on archaic charges of …
While most of the U.S. media this week rolled out “box set”-type compilations of the best of ten years of reporting on Osama bin-Laden, the magazine most al-Qaeda watches are waiting for is the next edition of Inspire. Dubbed by the LA Times as the “Vanity Fair of jihadi publications,” the next edition of the glossy produced by al-Qaeda …
Almost unnoticed on Wednesday, as two rival Palestinian factions agreed to bury the hatchet, was the head of Hamas announcing that his group, which exists for armed struggle against Israel, was willing to give peace with the Jewish state a chance, too. The statement from Khaled Mashal was grudging and hardly optimistic, but cut enough …