Shut Up and Sing: Sting Edition
How I forgot to ask Sting about his bad lyrics and tarnished human rights record… More »
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Saturday, January 29, 2011
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How I forgot to ask Sting about his bad lyrics and tarnished human rights record… More »
The point is to be publicly robbed of dignity, in a way that draws attention to policies and registers a public protest against them… More »
Visiting Ezra Pound's sole autobiographer reveals the madness and insight of an anti-Semite… More »
Incarceration in America is a failure by almost any measure. But what if the prisons could be turned inside out, with convicts released into society under constant electronic surveillance? Radical though it may seem, early experiments suggest that such a science-fiction scenario might cut crime, reduce costs, and even prove more just.… More »
The failure of the PJAK, a Kurdish paramilitary group, shows how ruthlessly Tehran is capable of dealing with its internal enemies… More »
For some, the burqa and niqab may offer welcome opportunities to live in anonymity… More »
Witches are overwhelming the courts in the Central African Republic. And that may be a good thing.… More »
How the Icelandic volcano could potentially cause a climate-change whiplash.… More »
Reduced to wielding cudgels, the Lord's Resistance Army is as outmatched as any insurgency could be. So why can't it be stopped?… More »
In Qom, the site of Iran’s secret uranium-enrichment facility, the Islamic Revolution remains as strong as ever.… More »
Two sites, one very large and one very small, dominate my memories of Bucharest in 1992. The very large one was the House of the Republic, a US$10-billion mammoth edifice constructed by dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who wanted his Palace and his Ministries of Truth, Love, and Peace all in one place. The small site was Ceausescu's grave.… More »
TRIPOLI - Afriqiyah Airways is better than its Web site suggests. Founded in 2001 as the airline of Africa (with a hub here, in the inconvenient-to-everywhere hermit state of Libya), it owns a fleet of Airbuses that still give off that nose-singeing, chemical-rich, new-plane smell. It is emphatically not Air Afrique, the West African carrier that went bust in 2002, that nearly shares Afriqiyah's name, and that became known for its eccentric service and proud…… More »
CAIRO -- After aerial bombing and rent control, I suppose one of the worst things that can happen to a city is acute mania for national sports. This week, Egypt went mad for soccer, as the Egyptian team played Algeria for the Arabs' only place in the 2010 World Cup. They beat Algeria in Cairo Saturday, scoring the decisive goal with seconds to go in stoppage time, then lost to Algeria in the tiebreaker game Wednesday night in Khartoum. I was present for the orgy…… More »
Last week, Rob Nordland filed a great story about the Iraqi police's use of the ADE 651, a bomb-detecting device that costs "$16,500 to $60,000 each" (love that margin of error) and does not, strictly speaking, detect bombs. The people at the James Randi Educational Foundation, never ones to decline a bet on a sure thing, offered a million dollars to the manufacturer if it could prove the device worked better than chance. The manufacturer, based in London, has…… More »
The Iranian government fielded an impressive squad of angry, hungry, Jew-hating fanatics. What of the opposition? Their counterprotest, centered slightly north and east of the main event, has attracted ample coverage from many sources, who offered reports that to my eyes, on the fringes of the counterprotest, sound plausible and accurate. I did not see Muhammad Khatami shoved to the ground, or any of the other more dramatic scenes of thuggery. Around Haft-e…… More »
Click here for all the installments of this account of the protests in Tehran last month. This is a small point. I have mentioned the funny hats, the parade of uniforms, the howling masses seeking to be heard and then entertained. What kept the event from being even more like a carnival or state fair (think Shriners, Boy Scouts, crowds at a sideshow) was the total absence of food, let alone Cokes and funnel cakes. Quds Day fell, as it does every year, on the…… More »
(This is an account of the Quds Day rally in Tehran. Click here for all parts of the series.) At a stand just off Enqelab, near the center of the Quds Day rally, a very active desk gave away and sold postcards and memorabilia about the Palestinian cause, and about the perfidy of the Israelis. For about $1.50 I bought Holocaust, a book of illustrations by the Iranian political cartoonist Maziar Bijani, whose work the organizers sold proudly. I reproduce a few…… More »
Traffic diminishes on Ferdowsi Street every Friday morning, and especially during Ramadan. But only on a strange and special Friday does it decline to almost nothing, as it did today. Normally it is one of those traffic-menaced central Tehran boulevards where drivers cut each other off for sport, and where pedestrians who missed the Iran-Iraq War can satisfy their urges for martyrdom. Today its car traffic was mostly blocked off, and all the pedestrians had…… More »
TEHRAN -- Slightly over a month ago, anti-government protesters (the ones not yet in prison, or murdered) went back to the streets of Tehran, in a counter-protest against a government-orchestrated parade. The protesters wore easily identifiable green, so they knew that if Basij militiamen wanted to bust their heads, their colors would mark clearly which heads to bust. And bust they did. Media and cell-phone cameras captured images of young revolutionaries…… More »
