Karl Marx’s 19th century political journalism holds up a lot better than do his general theories of capitalism, socialism and history. Indeed, the father of modern communism may well have nailed the nature of the 2011 revolution in Egypt in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a tract written by the German in 1852. And Friday’s …
A.Q. Khan’s Revelations: Did Pakistan’s Army Sell Nukes to North Korea?
Abdul Qadeer Khan is tired of being a scapegoat. The controversial father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb shared hi-tech secrets and equipment with a host of rogue regimes — including North Korea and Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya — earning himself international notoriety and a 2005 TIME magazine cover that dubbed him “the Merchant of …
Why the NYT’s Immigration Report Is A Welcome Antidote to the U.S. Debate
It’s big (and overdue) news this week that Mexico City and Washington have finally come to an agreement that lets Mexican truckers ferry their freight into the U.S. But Damien Cave’s excellent and provocative New York Times article about the decline of illegal Mexican immigration into the U.S., which ran on the front page yesterday, …
Tragic Deaths Underscore the World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis
197 mostly Somali migrants died when their overladen boat capsized in the Red Sea. Escaping a world desperately short of water, they met their end by drowning.
That sad irony underscores the collective misfortune of those enveloped by the worst ongoing humanitarian crisis in the world: they were fleeing the parched Horn of Africa, …
U.K. Hacking Scandal! Read All About It! (But Not in the News of the World)
UPDATE: Andy Coulson, former communications director for British Prime Minister David Cameron, is to be arrested Friday over his alleged involvement in the hacking of mobile phones while editor of the News of the World, according to the Guardian.
The end, when it came, was quick and brutal—not unlike the punchy stories about the …
The Ben Gurion Airport Protest: Picking the Wrong Line?
Of the many fruits born of the Arab Spring, is any more exotic than the protest unfolding at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport this week? In what Palestinian organizers describe as a kind of sidelong challenge to Israeli control of access to the occupied territories, activists are arriving at the airport, standing in line at …
What Tristane Banon’s Novels Tell Us About DSK’s French Accuser
As the battle between New York prosecutors and Dominique Strauss-Kahn continues to disintegrate into what increasingly looks like a legal paintball war using bazookas and rotten fruit (seemingly paralyzing hits of semi-gelatinous melon and fungoid kumquat being regularly scored by both sides), the French are taking closer look at the …
Is Israel the ‘National Home of the Jewish People’?
In a scathing commentary on the folly of the Obama Administration relying on Dennis Ross to resuscitate Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Israeli journalist Akiva Eldar notes that Ross has been at the center of just about every failed initiative on that front over the past two decades — and that now, as ever, he is running …
Will New Evidence of War Crimes Tip the Scales Against the Sri Lankan Government
On June 14, the British television network Channel 4 broadcast a stunning hour-long documentary presenting footage of horrific abuses allegedly committed by Sri Lankan troops during the last months of the country’s war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. The images are graphic and profoundly disturbing. They include the …
One New Message: Press and Police Shamed by U.K. Phone Hacking Scandal
If you didn’t cry, you’d laugh. There are elements of farce to the saga gripping Britain—a tangled tale of criminality and corruption, of phone-hacking, glad-handing and back-slapping, of politicians in thrall to the power of the press and of police in the pay of the press. But for some it has been a tragedy compounded. Take Graham …
Venezuela’s Bicentennial: Should Chávez Re-Examine Bolívar – and His Revolution?
George Washington and Simón Bolívar are rightly remembered as the New World’s greatest independence heroes, but the anti-democratic flaws each possessed are too often forgotten. Washington was a slave-owner, a fact most Americans disregard during commemorations like this week’s July 4 fete. Likewise, the Caracas-born Bolívar …
Justice Deferred: Why Indonesia Doesn’t Want to Host the ‘Bali Bomber’ Trial
You’d think Indonesia would jump at the chance to try Umar Patek, the alleged mastermind of the 2002 Bali Bombings. But the head of the country’s anti-terror agency, Ansyaad Mbai, says a high-profile terror trial is too much of a security risk. Patek, one of the leaders of the al-Qaeda linked Southeast Asian terror group Jemaah …
Clashing Op-eds: Recommended (Perhaps Even Required) DSK Reading
Well-deserved props to both the New York Times and Washington Post (What? I can do more than criticize!) , whose op-ed writers today contributed interesting observations and arguments about where the Dominique Strauss-Kahn sexual assault case should go from here—and how the next steps taken in it will reflect upon the American …