In February 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa inciting the faithful to murder author Salman Rushdie for blasphemy. Within a few days, professional writers convened in London, New York, and elsewhere to discuss countering this threat. In London, we met at the National Union of Journalists" ...
Everyone is a spy now. The state has always spied on its citizens, but the lens is turning the other way. For that, we are indebted to Julian Assange, Wikileaks, and the sources passing along military and diplomatic documents. This turnabout redresses the balance between government and public to a ...
Sometimes a story brings an era into focus, and that story now is the saga of fake Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour. He was ostensibly a senior Taliban official, and American bureaucrats thought they were negotiating with him. "But now, it turns out," Carlotta Gall and Dexter Filkins wrote in ...
The printer cartridge bombs which nearly blew up U.S.-bound commercial jets have turned Sana"a, Yemen, into the new world terror capital. Terror, which the United States treats as if it were a state, has had many capitals and will undoubtedly have many more in this seemingly perpetual battle ...
Israel is at it again, caught by its own free press with its hand in the till"not so much the till as the land that other people till. The Israeli press is not only free, it exposes official malfeasance, and reporter Nir Hasson of the daily Haaretz wrote last Friday: The Israel Lands ...
Congress shall make no law…abridging...the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. "First Amendment, US Constitution Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association. "Article 20, Universal ...
Spare a kind thought for my old friend Michael Morrell's oldest son, Geoff, the Pentagon's Press Secretary. The Defense Department has tasked poor Geoff with providing its public reaction to Julian Assange's Wikileaks disclosure on Saturday of 391,832 documents relating to America's war in Iraq. ...
Captain Black from Catch-22 is back, but this time he's Israel's Foreign Affairs Minister. Although Avigdor Lieberman only rose to the rank of corporal in the Israeli Defense Forces, he can stand in for Captain Black any day. His campaign to force immigrants to Israel who happen not to be Jewish to ...
An international shouting match is underway over the fate of the city everyone loves but no one wants to live in: Venice. It started back in 2008, after Venice ran out of cash to maintain its more famous monuments. To cover some of the repairs on the Palazzo Ducale and the Bridge of Sighs (through ...
An Irishman's home is his coffin. "James Joyce, Ulysses The dead use a graveyard forever. "Nathan Englander, The Ministry of Special Cases Over the last couple of months, corpses have turned up all over the world. In August alone, the following bodies were found: "¢ In Bosnia, near ...
