with Ellen McCreary Ioanes It began on a golf course. That’s where textile executive George Moretz and now-Rep. Robert Pittenger, R-N.C., forged a friendship during the early 2000s. The two belonged to Grandfather Golf & Country Club in Linville, North Carolina, a club where elite clientele pay up to $65,000 for memberships. In 2008, Pittenger
U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler has done everything right. As an undergraduate at Columbia he led a chapter of the Zionist Organization of America. In 1981, while serving in the state Assembly, he drafted a resolution calling on Congress to block the sale of surveillance aircraft to the Saudis. As a member of the House of
I vaguely remember World War 3. Growing up, I was dimly aware of it lurking behind sleek curves and rippling muscles, spandex and tights and capes, the glossy sheen coating it all. World War 3 was all hard angles and contorted bodies, fists and teeth and spraypaint and blood. It was a dispatch from another
Despite severe security issues and other debilitating weaknesses, Libya these days has one unexpected strength: Most of its people agree on major issues that are often hopelessly divisive… Read more…
Slowly, the small group of demonstrators approaches the soldiers. Around seventy-five people had turned out for this week’s protest, a mix of Palestinian villagers and Israeli activists, women and children, international fellow travelers, a handful of reporters. The crowd was chanting and clapping as they wound their way down the road leading to the spring
Aeroport Mohammed Cinq, Morocco. We pass through security to the strains of a muzak cover of Hotel California. This is not really the song I want to hear at the airport where I’ve got a two-and-a-half hour layover. There’s flute involved. Later, the theme from The Godfather wafts across the departures lounge. Read more…
Every day, shortly before 9:30, the curtain goes up — automated venetian blinds rising behind what must be bulletproof glass — and the players take the stage. The accused enters from the left, accompanied by two guards, sits down with his back to the audience, and awaits his judges. We watch through a long, rectangular
Take the long drive southwest out of the capital on one of the only paved roads in Liberia, and eventually you’ll hit one of the country’s few remaining traffic signs, announcing a fork in the road. The arrow pointing to the right is labeled simply ‘”Airport.” To the left: “Firestone.” Read more…
Lost was a travesty. It was always a story of characters haunted and driven by their pasts, of absent fathers and shrewish mothers, of moral ambiguity in the guise of righteous conviction, of the struggle for free will in a universe in which your every action might be predetermined. And in the end, the writers
Almost a year ago, President Barack Obama used his long-awaited speech in Ghana to address a question with which the African continent is all too familiar: corruption. “No country is going to create wealth if its leaders exploit the economy to enrich themselves,” Obama lectured his audience… Read more…