Updated Sunday June 5, 2.25 pm, EDT:
Israeli troops opened fire on Sunday on Palestinian protesters marching on the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, as part of a series of demonstrations marking the outbreak of the June 1967 war that left the Golan, the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in Israeli hands. Further clashes were reported in …
In China food supplies and food prices are deeply sensitive topics. So by the time the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization issued a special alert warning in February that a prolonged drought in the North China Plain was a “potentially serious problem” for the country’s winter wheat crop, China’s leaders had already …
Google and China aren’t exactly pals. The Internet company pulled part of its business out of mainland China last year, saying it was fed up with Beijing-imposed censorship regulations and what it believes were Chinese-originated attacks on its systems. (The fact that Google was lagging behind domestic search engines might have been a …
The after-shocks of the rape charges against ex-IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn in the U.S. seem to be eroding France’s unwritten media rule against publicly delving into the private sexual affairs of national politicians. This week, the press has paid rapt attention to allegations of criminal sexual behavior by two French political …
In Yemen, over three decades of authoritarianism are unraveling in a bloody maelstrom. The regime of President Ali Abdullah Saleh has brutally staved off protests against its rule, fueled by frustrations over a lack of political freedoms in the country and the perceived graft of Saleh’s family and cronies. At least 350 people have …
When Congress handed down the budget resolution for the 2011 fiscal year in April, widespread cuts were to be expected. But when an eleventh hour cut to international education programs was wedged in, those Americans whose job it is to know about the rest of the world saw it as an assault both on their studies and U.S. diplomacy around …
The global war against drugs is fought seemingly every day in the jungles of Colombia and the mountains of the Hindu Kush, the inner cities of the U.S. and the trafficking corridors of Central America. But, according to a new report, it’s an abject disaster.
The Global Commission on Drug Policy, an organization launched by former …
Will they swap stories of life in detention? Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who languished for five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, is to meet on June 2 with Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese democracy activist who before being released from house arrest last November spent the better part of two decades in confinement. The …
Naoto Kan, Japan’s beleaguered prime minister, has acknowledged for the first time since March 11 that he may step down — but not until he’s done doing what he needs to do.
Kan has come under increasing pressure from both inside and outside his party to give up his post after his handling of the March 11 …
FIFA president Sepp Blatter may have survived the storm ravaging soccer’s global governing body, but don’t expect his reelection to quiet the growing challenges to the organization’s status quo. Nor will critics be placated by the procedural changes Blatter has outlined for the way FIFA will choose which countries host the 2026 …
Reports of Saleem Shahzad’s horrible death made the front pages of some of the newspapers in India today. Like the other alarming news from Pakistan lately, the murder of this prominent journalist only confirms India’s longstanding criticism of the ISI as a source of treachery. Anita Joshua, writing on the front page of the Hindu today, …
Julian Cribb’s The Coming Famine opens in Hokkaido, Japan, at a meeting of the G8. It’s 2008, the financial crisis is underway and food prices are soaring. Nonetheless, the attendees tuck into an eighteen course feast of caviar, sea urchin roe, Kyoto beef, conger eels, truffles and champagne, prepared by some sixty chefs. They also …
“BRITAIN’S SECRET WAR” screams the headline in the June 1 Daily Mirror. The British tabloid has adorned its front page and an inside spread with blurred images captured by a crew from the al-Jazeera television network showing “footage of 11 ex-SAS and Parachute Regiment soldiers in Libya training the rebels in military tactics to defeat …
