Algiers
The Beauty and Inhumanity of Oscar Niemeyer’s Architecture
The Novel That Frightened Hamas and the Arab League
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During his campaign and at the beginning of his presidency Barack Obama promised to shut Guantanamo and give (most of) its prisoners their freedom. Freedom is a difficult state to bestow on people, especially those who have lived in the circle or shadow of terror or terrorism. In any case, the Congress won't allow the president to close the penitentiary at the southern tip of Cuba. And it certainly won't permit him to sprinkle the remaining inmates around America. This is another instance of Obama choking on his own words. READ MORE >>
The Furrows of Algeria
The German Mujahid By Boualem Sansal Translated by Frank Wynne (Europa Editions, 240 pp., $15) I. READ MORE >>
Persian Gulf
So far America's war on terrorism has converged nicely with the regional interests of the world's leading sponsor of international terrorism: Iran. After September 11, 2001, the United States worked with Tehran's mullahs to help oust their Sunni rivals to the east in Afghanistan, the Taliban. And now, nearly 13 months after Osama bin Laden's hijackers toppled the World Trade Center, President Bush has made it clear he intends to repeat the favor by toppling Iran's rival to the west: Saddam Hussein. READ MORE >>
Why I Love America
I had reported from some twenty-four countries before I set foot in America. I will never forget the first shock—even after having been in every country from the Sudan to South Africa—at realizing that I was in another place entirely, a New World. In the casbah of Algiers during the first referendum called by de Gaulle in 1959, when the women hurrying down the steep streets to vote for the first time pulled their yashmaks around their faces as they passed a man (which seemed to me only to make their dark eyes more fascinating), I was still in the Old World, however strange it was. READ MORE >>
