The fact that President Barack Obama on Thursday found himself insisting that the facts support his Administration’s efforts to hold Tehran accountable for a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington suggests that the world is not yet rushing to fall in line with his call for “the toughest sanctions” on Iran.
The “toughest …
It was Chile’s own man-on-the-moon moment. In fact, for those of us who were there, last year’s miraculous rescue of 33 trapped Chilean miners seemed in some ways eerily, wonderfully similar to a moonwalk. It played out in the cold dead of night on a remote and rocky desert landscape that might as well have been the lunar …
The future of Afghanistan can be seen in a lump of lustrous black rock showcased on Wahidullah Shahrani’s bookshelf. Or so he would have me believe. The energetic minister of mines has spent the past half hour elucidating the potentials of the rich iron deposit in the mountainous province of Bamiyan from which that rock comes. He …
A glance at the Reporters’ Gallery of the House of Commons indicates how rich and deep Britain’s tradition of political satire runs. Sketch writers—journalists employed to distill their rare understanding of Westminster’s doings and beings into intense bursts of snark—hog the front seats, craning to capture details that transform the …
The legal proceedings against Dominique Strauss-Kahn for sexual assault and attempted rape continued thinning out Thursday, as French prosecutors dropped their inquiry into charges the former International Monetary Fund chief attacked French author Tristane Banon during a 2003 meeting. But that decision by French justice …
Rights groups are calling on Indonesia to investigate the fatal shooting of gold and copper mine workers in eastern Indonesia. In a gruesome escalation of a dispute between U.S.-based Freeport-McMoRan and workers from their Grasberg mine, security forces opened fire on a crowd of strikers, killing one man and injuring more than a …
Ours is an era where going viral is considered a sign of achievement, where being late with a trending item is the paragon of lame, yet where the mind-boggling proliferation of news sources has somehow resulted in the considerable reduction of topics and events covered by an often echoing press. One consequence of that is it’s no …
“We are not talking to Iran, so we don’t understand each other,” outgoing Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen told the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace last month. “If something happens, it’s virtually assured that we won’t get it right — that there will be miscalculation, which could be extremely dangerous …
As French Socialist heavyweights Martine Aubry and François Hollande gear up for their Oct. 16 run-off in the contest to select the party’s 2012 presidential candidate, other leftist leaders have joined media pundits to hail the enormous public interest and enthusiasm generated by a primary process whose success was anything but …
While left-wing dissent may have a long history in the U.S., so too do the impulses of knee-jerk cynicism and contempt for such radical display. Much of the initial coverage of the Occupy Wall Street protests in Lower Manhattan — with the notable exception of some journalists, including my colleague Nate Rawlings — struggled to …
China and Vietnam, which traded accusations this summer over rival territorial claims in the South China Sea, signed an agreement Tuesday outlining basic measures to help settle their ongoing dispute. The agreement, reached during a visit to Beijing by Vietnamese leader Nguyen Phu Trong, calls for China and Vietnam to hold biannual …
If Iranian government operatives really did try to contract a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., as the Obama Administration alleges today, then they weren’t just being diabolical. They were being fairly stupid.
Granted, the Zetas – the drug mafia that Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar …
Win-win outcomes are all too rare in the Middle East, but the agreement that will see Hamas free captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for a reported 1,000 Palestinian prisoners will allow each of its stakeholders to claim victory.
Details of the deal concluded in Cairo under Egyptian mediation remain sketchy, but it is …
