“THE principal question for Israelis,” Hussein Agha and Robert Malley write in the latest edition of The New York Review of Books, “is no longer how to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians. It is why and at what cost.”
Their article coincides with revelations, through leaks of secret documents obtained by news network Al Jazeera [...]
THE manner of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s departure from Tunisia last week has set many hearts a-beating — some with the joy of expectancy, others with fear. Such a development, after all, is unprecedented in the modern Arab world.
And, the prospect of a domino effect has been widely trumpeted, particularly in the context of [...]
LATE last year, a 22-year-old by the name of Jared Lee Loughner walked into a store that sold hunting equipment and picked out a semi-automatic handgun.
A record of mental instability apparently did not stand in the way of that transaction in Tucson, Arizona. Last Saturday, Loughner took the weapon to where his local congresswoman, Gabrielle [...]
IT is seldom, if ever, a good idea for a storyteller to turn into the story, but in the case of the WkiLeaks editor-in-chief there would appear to be mitigating circumstances for this metamorphosis. Julian Assange does not shy away from media attention, but it is unlikely he intended to grab the headlines as a [...]
FIFTY years ago this week, what eventually became one of the most readily recognisable concert venues in the world hosted its first performance, so to speak.
The Sydney Opera House was in the early stages of its construction back then; it would be more than a decade before it was officially inaugurated. Paul Robeson, one of [...]
THE extent of the devastation caused by the electoral tsunami that the White House has been bracing for should become clear by today.
Every opinion poll suggested that the House of Representatives would be lost to the Republicans by a substantial margin, and that the Democrats should consider themselves fortunate if they were able to hold [...]
THE nearly 400,000 war logs relating to the conflict in Iraq publicised by WikiLeaks at the weekend have elicited broadly predictable responses from various sources.
Notable among them have been condemnation by Hillary Clinton and the Pentagon on the basis that the revelations could put American lives at risk, and a complaint from Nouri al-Maliki that [...]
“My daddy was a miner,” goes one of the best-known protest songs to have emerged from the beleaguered mining community in Harlan County, Kentucky, in the early 20th century, “now he’s in the sun and air.”
Being in the sun and air, in that context, meant being without a job — not a desirable fate, notwithstanding [...]
Veteran Washington Post correspondent Bob Woodward’s latest book, Obama’s Wars, has, among other things, helped to confirm suspicions of a high level of dysfunction in Washington vis-à-vis the nine-year war in Afghanistan, particularly in terms of disagreements between the Pentagon and the White House about how it ought to be prosecuted.
It also highlights a series [...]
It is not difficult to understand why Suresh Kalmadi attracted a huge cheer at the inauguration of the Commonwealth Games in New Delhi last Sunday when he declared, “India has arrived.”
The same crowd had booed him just minutes earlier, in a reflection of India’s anguish at the national humiliation over the chaos that preceded the [...]
