Briefing Archive

TEL AVIV, Israel — You don’t have to understand Hebrew to read the worried faces of Israelis glancing at this week’s newspapers. The picture under yesterday’s bold headlines shows the familiar round face of North Korea’s Kim Jong Il. Looking at him from a Tel Aviv sidewalk near the beach, Israeli readers show a familiar expression: one of profound worry. “Now Iran will feel it can do whatever it wants,” said Nili Orvin, a local businesswoman. North Korea, on Asia’s Pacific rim, lies thousands of miles from the Mediterranean Sea that laps gently upon Tel Aviv’s shore. Still, Israelis know […]

BUSAN, South Korea — The Korea Earthquake Research Center recorded a tremor in North Korea at 10:36 a.m. on Monday. It measured 3.6 on the Richter scale and was not a natural event. Shortly after the seismic activity, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) announced they had successfully completed a nuclear test, calling it a “historic event,” and a “great leap forward.” North Korea became the ninth member of the elite club of nations that possess the nuclear bomb. The test was conducted in a tunnel dug into a small mountainside near the village of Hwadae on the northeastern coast […]

BASRA, Iraq — Shadows are growing long on the afternoon of Oct. 1 when British Army Captain Steve Morte, 39, strolls into the garden courtyard of a decaying Saddam-era palace-turned-British base in this sweltering city of 2 million. In one sweaty hand he clutches a government-issued receipt book. In the other, $25,000 in cash in a soggy yellow envelope. His grip on the money tightens as he approaches two Iraqi men sitting on a bench, for they are — or were — the enemy. But dealing with erstwhile enemies — and tolerating cultural mores that seem somehow wrong to Westerners […]

JERUSALEM — When Israeli newspapers shook the newsstands in late September with word that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Saudi Arabian officials — perhaps even the Saudi King — had held face-to-face talks, not everyone was shocked at the revelation. The two countries have no formal relations. In fact, the official enmity is such that Saudi law, as that of most Arab states, bars anyone with a passport showing an Israeli stamp from entering the country. Still, a handful of Middle East observers were not surprised to hear of possible talks between Israel and the Kingdom. That’s because they predict […]

Russian President Vladimir Putin issued a statement Oct. 1 declaring that the Georgian government’s arrest of seven Russian officers was needlessly provocative, and suggesting a U.S. hand in the incident. “There seem to be some powers which specialize in creating a new crisis every day, thinking it will distract attention from the old problems,” Putin said. “In the short term it might have some effect, but it absolutely will not help in resolving old and very serious crises around the world.” Putin compared the Georgian government’s actions to the paranoia of the U.S.S.R. under Stalin and his secret police chief […]

WASHINGTON — With its move into eastern Afghanistan last week, NATO assumed full responsibility for security throughout the entire country, but the commander of the Atlantic alliance said in Washington Wednesday that victory “will not be resolved by military means.” U.S. Marine General James L. Jones said NATO’s troop strength of 35,000 from 26 member countries is “adequate for the mission,” but he said the real challenge is to break the logjam in the faltering reconstruction effort and halt the growth of the narco trade. Troops from some NATO countries were first deployed in Kabul in 2001 as ISAF, the […]

George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could be the same person. They just look different. A South Korean will head the United Nations. Turkey is meddling in Kirkuk. The tide of history is turning in Latin America. Cheney is actually a reincarnation of LBJ, and there’s more to the flap between Georgia and Russia than meets the eye. Indeed, many wild things were asserted in the world’s English-language op-ed pages this week. But far more outrageous claims could have been made. No, wait, they were: North Korea said it’s going to detonate a nuke. On what may have prompted this […]

BUDAPEST, Hungary — In parts, the May 26 speech Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany gave to his Socialist party was something of a grand mea culpa. “I almost died when I had to pretend for one and a half years as if we were governing,” he said on tape. “I am through with this. We either do it and then you’ve got your man, or you pick someone else.” At other times, the speech seemed a sweeping political treatise delivered in the belligerent incoherence of a taxi driver stuck in traffic. “Since they know my mother’s name . . . […]

ACCRA, Ghana — On the job at a Internet cafe near the city center, cousins Aaron Animley and Rashid Teye Appeynarh inflict their musical tastes on the paying customers. Their fondness for hip-hop, especially selections featuring four-letter words, unsurprisingly conforms to the passion of their peers across the Atlantic. The artists in permanent heavy rotation by the self-styled DJs include the late Tupac Shakur and hip-hop impresario Jay-Z. “I like Jay-Z from the scratch to the up. A boy on the street grow up to be a superstar, millionaire,” Appeynarh, 23, said. “He encourage me whenever I see him. The […]

JERUSALEM — When Israelis heard that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was coming to meet with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, their reaction required no words, a shrug of the shoulders was enough. Most believed that Condi’s diplomatic prowess would achieve little in the Holy Land. This may be the land of miracles, but it is also the land of grudges, even among cousins. Make that especially among cousins. The prevailing view here even before Condi arrived on Wednesday was that as long as Palestinians continued battling one another, unable to decide on a unified strategy for the future, anything […]

HONG KONG — The arrest of the most high-profile public figure in China in a decade may be a shocking example of endemic corruption in the world’s biggest out-of-control economy, but the question on the lips of some financial investigators in the West is: Will the trail of Chen Liangyu’s ill-gotten loot lead to the United States? The shadow economy in China, a combination of embezzlement, bribery, tax avoidance and underground banking of both legal and illegal money, is huge, and growing. Much of this money is laundered abroad, mostly via Hong Kong, say investigators, and there is growing evidence […]

As a joke, he once called the Saudi Arabian soccer team “terrorists,” something Arab states found not so funny. And as a jab at an older politician he was replacing, he said “every man whose wife grows old has earned a younger woman,” something women found not so funny. And last month an audio tape surfaced that was not a jab and not a joke, but an admission of lies, lies, lies about the economy, something the people of Hungary found not funny at all. Hungary’s hip Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurscany has never been in hotter water, but he has […]

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — A “black year,” is how the local press has described the series of scandals battering the Colombian army in recent months. In an unprecedented address to the nation last month, Colombia’s president, Alvaro Uribe, urged citizens to restore their faith in the country’s armed forces after the head of the army issued a public statement tentatively accusing his own troops of staging terrorist attacks in Bogotá days before the May presidential elections. The attacks were originally blamed on guerrilla groups. General Mario Montoya, head of the army, said that there was evidence to suggest that soldiers and […]

BAMAKO, Mali — Lambert Coulibaly, 40, seems an unlikely proponent of the global marketplace. Employed as a maintenance worker by a hotel in the River Quarter of Mali’s capital, he spends not a little of his day sitting around and smoking. Yet Coulibaly commutes to his job each day on a Chinese-made Yamaha motorcycle. As he travels around Bamako, he is joined by tens of thousands of Malians on motorcycles and mopeds, the majority of which are also Chinese. “The Chinese motorcycles are cheaper. Plus the Japanese are more expensive,” Coulibaly said. He said his Chinese-made Yamaha cost about $620. […]

With respect to the U.S. Air Force’s program to replace its aging aerial refueling tankers, it may be time to expect the unexpected: that this big acquisition program may proceed hereafter without a major hitch. Sheer necessity may make it so, according to a defense analyst who has spoken with senior Air Force officials about the program. That driving necessity: “They do not have the money to keep this competition going” indefinitely, said Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based think tank. The Air Force had been very close to wrapping up a tanker replacement deal with The […]

ANKARA, Turkey — Not since the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire — the seat of the 400-year old Turkish Muslim caliphate — have Europeans been so preoccupied with Turkey. As poor Muslim immigrants from the Middle East and Africa flood the gates of Europe in search of work, the prospect of Turkey’s accession into the EU has provoked the EU’s most heated existential crisis to date. Turkey, the gateway between Europe and the Middle East, began its Europeanizing mission well over half a century ago when it first applied to join what was then called the European Economic Community. Until […]

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina — When asked about his over-the-top Bush name calling, Hugo Chavez late last month told Time magazine: “Bush has called me worse things: tyrant, populist dictator, drug trafficker, to name a few.” Sticks and stones break bones. And in Washington names and labels can too. Washington watchers say advocates for toothy Chavez containment are searching for new things to call the fiery leader who, if the heavy, hard-to-refine crude in Venezuela ‘s Orinoco region is counted, controls the world’s largest oil estate. In other words, Washington is hunting for a smoking gun to link to Chavez. But […]