As cosmopolitan as his name, Juliano Mer-Khamis was the son of a Jewish mother who had fought with the elite Palmach force during the 1948 war that created Israel, and a Christian Arab prominent in the Israeli Communist Party. When he was shot and killed by masked men on Monday, he was sitting in his car outside the theater he had …
More Catholic than the Pope? Manila Suburb Cracks Down on Condoms
If you live in Alabang and want to have safer sex, you’re going to need a doctor’s note. That’s because the wealthy Manila suburb has made prophylactics prescription-only. The local council says they wanted to discourage sex outside of marriage. They also wanted to stir debate about the morality birth control as the nation mulls its …
India’s Telecom Scandal: Titans of Industry Implicated
What to make of the charges filed over the weekend in India’s multi-billion telecom scandal? Andimuthu Raja, India’s former telecommunications minister and a leader of one of the Congress Party’s key regional allies, was among those named. The Wall Street Journal reports that he was charged with cheating, forgery, conspiracy, …
Global Briefing, April 4, 2011: Banned Books and Broken Promises
There Will Be Blood— In a dispatch from Kabul, John Wendle explains how the actions of one extremist preacher in Florida sparked violence in Afghanistan; Elsewhere, the Wall Street Journal reconstructs last week’s attack on a U.N. compound and the subsequent murder of seven U.N. workers.
Missing Persons — To the list of …
Democracy, Kazakh Style: Where the Challenger Votes for the Incumbent
Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has ruled this Central Asian state for the entirety of its independent existence following the disintegration of the U.S.S.R, cruised to reelection this Sunday in polls that reportedly saw over 90% of eligible voters turn out. Critics, though, say the election was a choreographed farce. …
Not Another Day in the Life of Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist and political activist who was detained Sunday at the Beijing airport while trying to fly to Hong Kong, has been blocked from leaving the country before. He was prevented from flying to South Korea in December, shortly before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony for imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo. Ai has …
Goldstone Rubs Off Tarnish, and Israel Basks
Israeli media termed it a “retraction,” the opinion column in which Richard Goldstone backed away from the most severe charges of the infamous Goldstone Report, the U.N. inquiry that accused both Israel and Hamas of targeting civilians — a war crime — in the three weeks of fighting that bridged 2008 and 2009. It’s hard to say quite …
Promises Unkept: The Latest on Eman el-Obeidi
Last Saturday, March 26th, a woman burst into the dining room of the Rixos hotel, one of the two Tripoli luxury hotels where foreign journalists are forced to stay. Libyan security guards had taken her, she said, and gang raped for two days. Within minutes of her appearance, hotel staff and the ubiquitous government minders that frequent …
Tragic But Not Troubled: The Murder of a Northern Irish Policeman
This afternoon a 25-year-old policeman was murdered by dissident Republicans in Northern Ireland. That news, horrific though it is, might seem unremarkable. After all, Ulster was—until really quite recently—a byword for terrorist violence. Only this morning, I laughed with pleasure to see a friend’s tweet. “Lovely lie in for 1st time …
Karzai’s Guilt: His Cynical – and Deadly – Exploitation of a Koran Burning
This time, don’t blame so much the knuckle-dragging preacher in Gainesville, Fla. Or a 24-hour media culture that’s ready to hype any loser playing with matches. This time the real culpability lies with Afghan President Hamid Karzai – to whose reputation for cynical opportunism can now be added the 12 people who were tragically …
Goldstone reconsiders his findings against Israel in Gaza war
In an op-ed shocker, the author of the Goldstone Report withdraws his harshest conclusions against Israel for its conduct in the three-week Gaza War that ended in January 2009. Richard Goldstone uses an opinion piece in the Washington Post to credit the Jewish state for investigating many of the incidents that led his U.N. fact-finding …
Mexico’s New Top Cop Pick: Can Its First Female Attorney General Rein In the Narcos?
Mexican President Felipe Calderón could stand to build a few bridges with Washington at the moment. Last month saw the resignation of the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, who many believe was forced out by Calderon’s unusually public complaints about confidential U.S. diplomatic cables, released last December by WikiLeaks, …
Gandhi, Lelyveld and the Great Indian Tamasha
A few words today on the tempest brewed up this week in the social-media teacup over Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography of Mohandas K. Gandhi. The controversy is over reports that the book depicts Gandhi as bisexual, particularly in its description of the Mahatma’s relationship with a German architect. Lelyveld he had treated the …