In January 1864, some strangely dressed men with odd accents arrived in the camp of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, whose troops had been reeling from shortages of arms and supplies. They demonstrate a new weapon – an amazingly high powered accurate “repeater” rifle – and offer it to Lee.
He …
This documentary is all over the place.
It is in part a history of modern Afghanistan and also a film about independent journalists – some of whom were killed – trying to report on the situation on the ground.
Afghanistan is called “The Graveyard of Empires” for good reason: Every …
Speculation swirls around today’s sudden resignation of Vladislav Surkov, the Kremlin’s chief ideologue who had thought up “sovereign democracy” and invented the Nashi youth groups. He name-dropped Lacan and Derrida and even allegedly wrote a novel called Almost Zero. And now he might have …
Yesterday, I mentioned in a blog post that Eimskip, the Icelandic shipping company, recently moved its North American hub from Norfolk, Virginia to Portland, Maine. This will be the American port’s first direct connection to Europe in 33 years, according to an excellent, fact-filled article …
The conflict between Russia and the territory of Chechnya is the backdrop for this film.
In it two Russian soldiers are taken away to a Chechen village after their group is ambushed. The reason they are captured is so that a villager can use them as a trade for …
As a Russian who first came to America as a small child and later spent his university years in Cambridge, Mass., I felt particularly gripped by the ongoing Boston bomber saga. There remain so many questions about why these two brothers, to whom the U.S. had given shelter, passports, schooling …
Even Violent Drug Cartels Fear God
By Damien Cave
The New York Times Magazine
“If the economy worked for the common good, there would be no Zetas. There would be no cartels,” says Robert Coogan, the chaplain at Cereso. Here the Zetas, Mexico’s most feared crime syndicate, run operations from …
U.S. Congressman Mike Rogers chairs the House of Representatives’ panel on intelligence, which this week overwhelmingly approved a new cyber security bill designed to enhance data sharing between the government and private industry to protect computer networks and intellectual property from cyber attacks.
Yet the day before it passed, Rogers had …
By Sarwar Kashmeri
It would be a mistake to view President Obama’s visit to Israel as just a fence-mending exercise. It is in fact part of a planned redesign of U.S. foreign policy that will change the face of American leadership around the world.
The redesign began with the appointment …
Writing in 1931, Aldous Huxley used Cyprus as the setting for a social experiment gone wrong in his dystopian novel “Brave New World.” The failed experiment sent a warning to future generations regarding the perils of excessive social tampering. Fast-forward nearly a century and Cyprus is yet again …
Depending on whom you listen to, Central Asia could be 1) the next mass target of Islamic insurgents; 2) on the verge of a client-state battle between Moscow and Beijing; or 3) fated to authoritarian leaders for the next generation.
Nestled between Russia and China, and bordering Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, …
The eurozone crisis is back on the international agenda with a very serious crisis unfolding in Cyprus right now. Some Wall Street investors might argue just in time to pull the rising U.S. stock market indices — the Dow Jones hit an all-time high recently — down for a better …
Coming on the heels of a UCLA study reporting that new trans-Arctic routes could be open to shipping by mid-century, Huigen Yang, the Director Polar Research Institute of China, met with Iceland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs, Össur Skarphéðinsson, on March 15 to discuss northern shipping. Both countries stand to benefit if …
They said it couldn’t be done. But at last, the Kremlin and some of its fiercest liberal critics have found themselves on the same team. The fact that the issue in question is their opposition to the proposed Cypriot bank levies says as much about the regime …
Today is 60 years since the death of Joseph Stalin. How do we know this? Well, it’s on the front page of the BBC, there’s an article in the Telegraph, Reuters, the Atlantic and pretty much everywhere else. Except Russia itself, that is, where the event hardly attracted any attention …
