The Arab freedom wave has now hit the shores of Europe and in the most unlikely of places: the Balkans. Croatia, an Adriatic nation that straddles the civilizational fault line between Central Europe and the Balkans, has been seething with public unrest and protests. For weeks, thousands of demonstrators have been assembling almost daily in […]
UNITED NATIONS — Political winter has returned to Lebanon, the tiny but cosmopolitan country on the crossroads of the Middle East. The long shadow of Syria and Islamic Iran has again fallen over bustling Beirut and brought the Lebanese to the brink, as the militant Hizbullah movement has deliberately engineered a collapse of the country’s […]
Imagine two lines on a graph — one zigs and zags, another rises rapidly. They could represent two current unsettling world currents. The first would chart U.S. efforts to eradicate Islamic terrorists, on Afghanistan and Iraq battlefields but also a wider intellectual war against political Islam from Casablanca to Zamboanga. The second would trace a […]
GAZA CITY — In a reversal of more than three decades of smuggling, Palestinian operators have been using some of the 1,500 tunnels that connect the Gaza Strip with the Sinai Peninsula to export goods to Egypt. Palestinian sources said the latest flow stemmed from the flood of cheap goods sent from Israel to the […]
Republican lawmakers of Cuban descent sharply criticized President Obama’s plans to loosen Cuban travel policy to allow students and church groups to go to the communist country, saying the changes will benefit the Castro regime while doing little for the average citizen. “Loosening these regulations will not help foster a pro-democracy environment in Cuba,” said U.S. Rep. Ileana […]
Mohammed Ghannouchi, the prime minister, announced he was taking over as acting president as the army moved in to seize control of the main airport in the capital Tunis. The collapse of the 23-year dictatorship, the first ever collapse of an Arab leader to a “people power” uprising, was met nervously by Tunisia’s allies. Mr […]
CHINA is in discussions with North Korea about stationing its troops in the isolated state for the first time since 1994, a South Korean newspaper reports. The Chosun Ilbo newspaper quoted an anonymous official at the presidential Blue House as saying that Beijing and Pyongyang recently discussed details of stationing Chinese soldiers in the North’s […]
The time was the mid-60s in Saigon, in many ways the nadir of the American effort in Vietnam, in its way worse than the Embassy rooftop depaftures of 1975. Washington had staged a military coup against President Ngo Dinh Diem, the only anti-Communist leader with credentials, then had him murdered. There was a revolving door […]