There was no real living room in our no. 14 Nahmani home. On the left side of the dining room with its round table, buffet and gramophone, there was the master bedroom. On its right, a wide folding door opened to father’s study. There was, however, a comfortably sized balcony, overlooking the garden. It stretched along the dining room with its large windows on either side of a glass paneled double door, letting in a great deal of light. (More…)
Cases of meningitis and malnutrition-related growth deficiencies are increasing in the besieged town of Madaya, where humanitarian aid deliveries are sporadic and insufficient. (More…)
The American intelligence community got two things out of the dusty Chadian hamlet of Ouadi Doum in Chad during the Reagan Administration. One was a Soviet-built Mi-25 Hind gunship left behind by the Libyan invaders, ferried out in 1987 for the military to take apart and study. (More…)
In 2002, French voters expected that their first round of presidential voting, in which candidates from many parties can run and the people are said to vote with their hearts, would end up with incumbent conservative Jacques Chirac against the Socialist Lionel Jospin coming in first and second. (More…)
Farah is a young woman living in Syria’s capital city, where she faces the daily struggles of trying to maintain a normal social and professional life in a country being ripped apart by war. (More…)
In the United States right now, little has been able to compete with Donald Trump for headlines. Police killings, mostly of black men, and the protests against them have managed. So have mass shootings, particularly when they could be connected to “radical Islam.” Besides those obvious above-the-fold stories, though, perhaps the most durable subject in the news has been the nation’s epidemic of overdoses. (More…)
The Balkan wars have been bloody and costly. We shall never know of the thousands of men, women, and children who died from privation, disease, and massacre. But the losses of the dead and wounded in the armies were for Montenegro 11,200, for Greece 68,000, for Serbia 71,000, for Bulgaria 156,000, and for Turkey about the same as for Bulgaria. (More…)
Much of the responsibility in caring for refugees arriving in Germany has fallen to local authorities. (More…)
It rained yesterday morning. The first rain of winter. The air was sharp, cold and grey. The grey light of days gone by. The wet street a deep blue-black. The grey of winter recalls what I have left behind. (More…)
It’s normal to hear NATO described as an “internationalist project” in Western Europe. Even the centre-left has long stood by the Atlantic alliance. Britain was signed up to NATO by the post-war Labour government. By contrast, France withdrew from NATO under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle as part of his politics of grandeur. Yet the NATO project may not have been so lost in the Cold War as it is today. (More…)
Farah is a young woman living in Syria’s capital city, where she faces the daily struggles of trying to maintain a normal social and professional life in a country being ripped apart by war. (More…)