A year after the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, The Wall Street Journal has published a lengthy article that provides new details, including the email exchanges between Pearl and his kidnappers in the days leading ...
Category: Blog
The Military, the Journalists, the Product
During the Gulf and Afghan wars, the Pentagon had a clear policy about press access to U.S. troops—the less the better. That’s changing. Victoria Clarke, the Pentagon spokeswoman, outlined a new policy in a background meeting with Washington bureau chiefs this week, and the Pentagon helpfully ...
Slouching Towards Baghdad
When I wrote for The Washington Post my boss was Michael Getler, who was in charge of the paper’s foreign coverage. He was a wizard at his job, and in his current position, as the Post’s ombudsman, he is, once more, a provocative master. In his column ...
Pardon My Language
I write for American publications that do not, in general, permit profanity. This is painful because I tend to write about people for whom profanity is oxygen, and their curses convey a sense of who they are. Alas, rules are rules. A particularly genteel publication once air-brushed a line in which ...
Correction of the Day
“WASHINGTON (AP) — In a Jan. 3 story about government approval of Prozac for children, The Associated Press, using incorrect information from the Food and Drug Administration, erroneously reported that up to 25 percent ...
Honesty About Oil
People who suggest that oil is the prime reason America might invade Iraq have tended to oppose the war for that very reason—fighting over oil would seem to be an unacceptably mercenary endeavor. Tom Friedman squares the circle ...
Plowshares Into Swords
This may tell us more about the consequences of 9/11 than anything else. Metal from the World Trade Center is being used to build a new warship.
Dazed and Confused in Baghdad
Tolstoy began “Anna Karenina” with his now-famous line, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” His view might hold true in the political world, too—successful regimes are all alike, while every failing regime fails in its own way. ...
When an American Car Hits a Double Standard in Kenya
An American diplomat in Nairobi attends a party at his ambassador’s residence and, possibly after a drink or two, gets into a head-on collision with a car driven by a teacher. The diplomat calls the American Embassy for help, a security detail arrives and whisks him away to a hospital, while ...
Nestle to (Famine-Hit) Ethiopia: Give Us More Money!
Fact #1: Ethiopia faces a famine that could be worse than the one that took a million lives in 1984.
Fact #2: Many years ago Ethiopia’s government nationalized a minor company partly owned by Nestle.
Fact #3: Ethiopia is offering $1.5 million to Nestle, which earned $3.9 billion in net profits ...