Less than six months after a hundreds-strong mob beat members of a minority sect with machetes, rocks and bamboo poles, killing three, the leaders of the barrage will walk free. The attack, which took place in a remote village in Banten province, was captured on video. Yesterday, at a heavily fortified courthouse outside the …
Couch Potato Briefing: Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime? Plus Nordic Nazism and Libyan Betrayal
Global Spin’s selection of weekend rental movies to bring you up to speed on the week’s events by Tony Karon and Ishaan Tharoor.
Grapes of Wrath
As the world watches a dysfunctional U.S. political system flailing helplessly in the face of an economic catastrophe slowly destroying the …
Preliminary Report On 2009 Air France Crash Indicates Pilot Responsibility
Some of the mystery behind the tragedy may be solved, but that doesn’t mean fighting is over about who’s to blame for the 2009 crash of Air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. New findings released Friday by French investigators indicated pilots of the craft were insufficiently trained for the emergency situation …
Mysterious Assassination Of Libyan Rebel Commander Threatens Further Division Of Anti-Gaddafi Forces
Details surrounding Thursday’s assassination of the commander of Libyan rebel forces remained confused on Friday, though one thing does seem clear amid the uncertainty: the killing isn’t good news for insurgents battling Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, or the Western nations backing their effort. Indeed, initial reaction to the death of …
China’s Uighur Problem: One Man’s Ordeal Echoes the Plight of a People
Who is Ershidin Israil? An Islamic terrorist? A brave journalist? Or a Chinese spy? This much appears to be clear. In 2009 after riots convulsed Xinjiang, the tumultuous northwestern region of China that is home to the ethnic Uighur people, the 38-year-old teacher decamped to neighboring Kazakhstan. Ershidin’s friends and relatives …
Beyond the Dalai Lama: Profiles of Four Tibetan Lamas-in-Exile
This is a guest post by Elizabeth Dias, a TIME contributor based in Washington.
When the Dalai Lama came to Washington this month, he wasn’t alone. Accompanying the spiritual leader of Tibetans-in-exile were a group of other leading rinpoches, or reincarnate lamas and teachers. These Tibetan clerics, or “precious jewels” as the …
Disarray on Gaddafi’s Fate, Top Rebel’s Killing Highlight Struggling Libya War Effort
(Update: The mysterious circumstances of Thursday’s killing of General Abdul Fattah Younes, military chief of staff of the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council, suggest the rebel war effort is teetering in crisis. The Independent reports that Younes had been in rebel custody at the time of his killing, having been arrested …
After Train Crash, Chinese P.M. Wen Jiabao Joins the Government’s Stumbling P.R. Effort
When things go truly wrong in China, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao is bound to make an appearance. Grandpa Wen, as the 69-year-old leader is affectionately known, is China’s Consoler in Chief, a soothing presence in the face of disaster. In 2008 he headed to the airport to board a flight to Sichuan 90 minutes after a massive earthquake …
Famine in Somalia: How Do You Feed Four Million Hungry People?
As 13 million in the Horn of Africa seek food assistance, aid workers are facing unique political and logistical challenges in helping an estimated 3.7 Somalis facing the threat of malnutrition and starvation.
While international organizations such as UNICEF and UNHCR, the U.N.’s refugee agency, work with local governments to …
New Violence in Kosovo Could Pose a Quandary for an Overstretched NATO
Throughout NATO’s war in Libya, the operation there has been compared with the one in Kosovo in 1999, in which 72 days of bombing Serbia forced the withdrawal of government forces from the province, where they’d been engaged in a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against the ethnic-Albanian majority. But while Libya has dragged on twice …
Reluctant Revolutionary Abbas Urges Palestinian Street Protests to Back U.N. Statehood Bid
The biggest problem on the desk of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a protest movement — not of Palestinians, but of young Israelis, who have poured onto the streets in their tens of thousands demanding that their government resolve a growing housing crisis. Sure, the Obama Administration has failed in its effort on …
Lame Pop Icons: France’s (Other) Cultural Exception
This kind of mind-boggling violence couldn’t happen anywhere but in France. Seriously.
On July 27, the imitator of a dead crooner no one outside France cares about stabbed a rival impersonator of a decrepit rock star few people beyond French borders have ever heard of (and have run from, ears plugged, if they have). Call it the …
Anger Over China’s High-Speed Train Crash Leads to Murmurs of Dissent
Not long ago China’s rapidly expanding high-speed rail network was a source of national pride, a feat of development that prompted a nod of approval from President Barack Obama during his State of the Union speech in January. Earlier this month a spokesman for the Ministry of Railways even crowed about the superiority of China’s …