Well that was totally unpredictable wasn't it? General James L. Jones is widely rumored to be Obama's preferred candidate to be White House National Security Adviser... Jones prepared a report on Israel's policies in the territories... The World Tribune said it "blasted Israel's role" for "hampering...

After arguing passionately over proposition 8, I feel that you all could use some humor.  This is my first attempt at humor in a long while.   It stops when I am depressed and I am trying to recover. I understand Michelle Obama got a grand tour of their new digs the other day and a little birdi...

Toward the end of the Cold War, Georgi Arbatov, the top America analyst in the Soviet Union, told his American interlocutors that the USSR was doing a terrible thing to the US, it was depriving it of its enemy. In a letter to the NY Times in 1987, he wrote: And here we have a ''secret weapon'' that ...

Here before us is a Soviet archival document,* a top secret report by a communist apparatchik who had received a delegation of US Senators led by Joseph Biden in 1979. After describing routine arms control discussions, it quotes Biden as telling the Soviets off-record that he did not really care abo...

Robert Priddy, former long-time head of the Sathya Sai Organization in Norway and retired academic from the University of Oslo, has recently written on J. Jegathesan, a charismatic and key leader in Sathya Sai Baba’s international cult. Although it may at first be difficult to credit that one ...

I dedicate this blog post to China, or 'the cock of the East' (as my Chinese teacher affectionately called it). China is 59 years old today! She invented the compass, printing, paper, and gunpowder. She held a great Olympics, recently put men in space, and performed a 'space walk'. But strangely can...

Photo by Staff Sgt. J.B. Jaso. Multi-National Force - Ira q A s Iraq transitions to a country on the mend and the ebbing violence takes it off the US front pages, I was reflecting on Iraq's next steps towards whatever end state it will have. For some reason, I remembered a "debate" I had with the Qu...

Dan Gillerman, outgoing Israeli ambassador to the UN, is always good for a sound-bite. Here are a couple of highlights from an interview in yesterday’s NYT: You recently called Jimmy Carter a “bigot” after he met with Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas. Is it true you were reprimanded by the...

This story first broke a week ago, but if you’ve not heard about it yet, well, just watch this video. The classy fellow promising he will try to arrange a meeting between Bush administration officials and former President of Kyrgyzstan Askar Akaev, and maybe, just maybe, try to give him a nudg...

Deborah Solomon interviews Dan Gillerman, Israel's departing ambassador to the United Nations, in the Times Sunday Magazine. (Solomon's questions in bold) The Bush administration, it seems, has not done much to advance the Mideast peace process. Would you agree? I think the key is in the Arab world....