Some facts from Mike Davis’ article “Planet Of Slums“: In 1950 there were 86 cities in the world with a population over one million; today there are 400, and by 2015, there will be at least 550. The present urban population (3.2 billion) is larger than the total population of the world in 1960. ‘The [...]
Describing the horror that the siege of Fallujah has become, he [Makki al-Nazzal, a lifelong Fallujah resident who works for the humanitarian NGO, Intersos] says, “I have been a fool for 47 years. I used to believe in European and American civilization.”
This story is impossible to summarize. You really have to read the whole thing. It reads like a soap opera written jointly by Salman Rushdie and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Here is a teaser: It turns out that divorcing Gulnora Karimova, known as “the Uzbek princess,” is no simple matter. Her father is Islam Karimov, president of [...]
I was just complaining the other day about how much the voiceovers they use in trailers for foreign language films annoy me. It is as if they are afraid to let the audience know that anyone in the film speaks a language other than English. It wouldn’t be so annoying if the voiceovers weren’t always [...]
We say that if America has entered the war to make the world safe for democracy, she must first make democracy safe in America. How else is the world to take America seriously, when democracy at home is daily being outraged, free speech suppressed, peaceable assemblies broken up by overbearing and brutal gangsters in uniform; [...]