I recently returned from the desert city of Durango, Mexico, where forensic officials are still trying to identify some 240 corpses discovered this year in mass graves. More than 200 other bodies have been found in similar fosas across northern Mexico. All were victims, many of them innocent victims, of the drug-trafficking …
“Atomic Anne” Lauvergeon Replaced As Head Of Nuclear Giant Areva
Anne Lauvergeon–longed ranked by international publications as one of the most influential and powerful women in global business—will be replaced as chairman of Areva, the one-stop nuclear giant she created in 2001. Thursday’s announcement by France’s conservative government to part with Lauvergeon when her current contract …
Clinton Condemns Use of Rape, Sexual Violence in Libya Conflict
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton says forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi are using rape as a weapon of war. In a statement released Thursday, she says the United States is “deeply concerned” about reports of “wide-scale” rape in the Libyan conflict. Citing the International Criminal Court’s findings and the case of Eman al Obeidi, she …
Al-Qaeda’s Nairobi Bomber: The Time He Got Away
Harun Fazul, the senior al-Qaeda operative killed in Somalia last week, could have been captured at the start of his terror career fully 13 years ago. He had just overseen the crime that put the terrorist organization on the map: the Aug. 7 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi that killed more than 200 people and injured …
An Exile Among Refugees on the Turkish Border
In a recent story for TIME, Rania Abouzeid tells the story a 61-year old Syrian exile living in southern Turkey who, after leaving the political world of Syria more than 20 years ago, has entered into a new role as a “Father of Knights,” or “Abu al-Forsan” in Arabic. His knights are approximately 70 injured wounded Syrian refugees who he …
Obama Pulls A Bush On Libya Vote
For a man whose sobriety, intellectual rigor, and oratory skills have often impressed supporters and opponents alike, U.S. President Barack Obama certainly seems comfortable in his current re-enactment of Bill Clinton’s infamous Lewinsky-era attempts to spin reality with heavy-handed semantic ploys. With Clinton, the issue of whether …
The Political Machinations Underlying Greece’s Debt Crisis
Joanna Kakissis examines for TIME the anti-austerity protests in Greece this week. After a year of austerity economics, even some formerly complacent Greeks have taken to the streets of Athens to protest Premier George Papandreou and his PASOK political party and their plan to institute an IMF-mandated second round of budget counts that …
Why Ba’asyir’s Sentence Doesn’t Spell the End of Extremism in Indonesia
He says he’s just simple preacher. But on Thursday, Abubakar Ba’asyir, the man widely considered the grandfather of Islamic militancy in Indonesia, was convicted on terror charges and sentenced to 15 years. Ba’asyir, 72, was charged with founding and financing a militant group that ran a terrorist camp in Aceh, northern Sumatra. The …
How Will China Respond to its Lead Poisoning Epidemic?
In recent years protests over environmental hazards, including lead poisoning from poorly regulated factories, have erupted across China. While those demonstrations have grabbed attention here, it’s been difficult to measure the extent of the problem. Now a report from Human Rights Watch provides a fuller degree of insight into the scope …
Five Things the Conflict in Libya Is Not
Libya-related chatter in the U.S. on Wednesday seemed to revolve around how the White House was going to wriggle away from stipulations of the War Powers Act — Swampland’s Jay Newton Small has the answer here. Evidently, the U.S. is acting in a “support” role, with no boots on the ground, and is “not engaged in any of the activities …
The Borderlands Between North and South Sudan Get Bloodier
Tensions in Sudan – which many observers hoped had turned a corner following this January’s Southern Sudanese independence referendum – have boiled over in yet another round of ethnic bloodletting in this battered and impoverished nation. This time, forces serving President Omar al-Bashir’s Arab-dominated government are reportedly …
Why Has Pakistan Targeted Informants Who Helped Track Bin Laden?
From TIME’s Islamabad contributor Omar Waraich.
In the days following the raid that discovered and killed Osama bin Laden, Pakistan’s top spymaster recalled that he had long made his feelings plain to his American allies. Where the two countries’ interests meet, Lieut. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha told a select group of journalists, there …
Could Iran’s Defiance of Western Nuclear Demands be a Rational Choice?
Despite mounting pressure on Tehran to engage in substantial negotiations over its nuclear program, no serious analyst is expecting a diplomatic breakthrough any time soon. After all, the Iranian leadership continues to signal defiance despite sanctions pressure, and the ferocious power struggle currently underway within the Tehran …