Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ex post facto request to use military forces in Ukraine should not really have come as a surprise. The big question is: What does he want?
Support for an independent Palestine alongside the state of Israel is not a constant. An odd tension in public opinion exists on both sides: The desire for the two leaderships to negotiate a settlement is set against a much weaker conviction that they are ...
The old bus in which Chris McCandless died in 1992 in the interior of Alaska — made famous in Jon Krakauer's best-selling book "Into the Wild" and later in the Sean Penn film of the same name — long ago lost its windows to ...
Ahmed al-Shayea was known as the "living suicide bomb" — the young Saudi driver of a fuel tanker bomb in Iraq who survived to renounce violence and warn his countrymen of the dangers of jihad. In the process he became Saudi Arabia's poster boy for ...
The details were barely reported at the time by the world's media: the killing on Dec. 21 in the west of Iraq's Sunni-dominated Anbar province of 24 Iraqi Army personnel, including the commander of the 7th Division. According to one account, the men were killed ...
The Bab al-Hawa crossing post sits under a low ridge on the Syrian-Turkish border, not far from the Turkish town of Reyhanli. There is a concrete canopy and a handful of buildings. It is important because of what lies not far away in the ...
Since Chris Christie's landslide re-election as governor of New Jersey earlier this month, which has seen him confirmed as an early favorite for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, the question of the precise nature of his political personality, and its appeal, has loomed as ...
In novelist Victor Pelevin's pungent satire on contemporary Russia, "The Sacred Book of the Werewolf," its narrator, a 2,000-year-old shape-shifter, kisses Alexander, a brutish but alluring officer with the FSB, the Russian security service — who is a werewolf, like all his colleagues. In ...
Last week, Alexei Navalny, the recently convicted Russian opposition blogger, lawyer and candidate for the post of mayor of Moscow, posted a provocative item on his site. It was an open letter addressed to the present mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin, accusing him of authorizing ...
It's easy to admire Edward Snowden for what he has revealed about U.S. and U.K. spying, and still feel deeply uncomfortable about his praise for Russia, of all places.
