Nagisa Oshima is the best film director in Japan still making good movies. There are other good directors (Kon Ichikawa), but they are reduced to doing company hack-work. Oshima can still do the films he likes, partly because he gets financial backing in France ...

NEW YORK — Baruch Spinoza, the 17th-century Dutch philosopher, Benjamin Disraeli, the 19th-century British prime minister, and Nicolas Sarkozy, the 21st-century French president, have one thing in common: All were sons of immigrants. People have migrated to other countries for thousands of years — to ...

NEW YORK — Why do Europeans adore America's president-elect, Barack Obama? Stupid question, you might say. He is young, handsome, smart, inspiring, educated, cosmopolitan, and above all, he promises a radical change from the most unpopular American administration in history. Compare that to his ...

NEW YORK — Two far-right parties, the Austrian Freedom Party and the Movement for Austria's Future, won 29 percent of the vote in the latest Austrian general election — double their total in the 2006 election. Both parties share the same attitudes toward immigrants, especially ...

NEW YORK — Seventy years ago this month in Munich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed a document that allowed Germany to grab a large chunk of Czechoslovakia. The so-called Munich Agreement would come to be seen as an abject betrayal of what Chamberlain ...