Picked for Current Tonight // Current

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3 months ago

Boston subway almost hits stumbling woman on the tracks

Amazing story and video.... more

JeremyGoode
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"Sesame Street" Is Now 40 Years Young

Even if you were watching "Sesame Street" when it first went on the air in 1969, I'm betting 40 years later every... more

Manatee_man
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Stroller Recall: Child Fingertip Amputations

Maclaren received reports that 12 children had fingertips amputated after they placed their finger in the hinge where the stroller... more

jmsrmy
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Anita Dunn to Step Down as White House Communications Chief

White House Communications Director Anita Dunn will step down by the end of November and be replaced by her deputy Dan Pfeiffer.

paintedacres
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Interview with Kareem Abdul Jabbar

Kareem Abdul Jabbar NBA basketball legend talks with CNN about his chronic myeloid leukemia. Basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar... more

Rickharmon25
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Clash between ships from the rival navies of North and South Korea

There has been a clash between ships from the rival navies of North and South Korea, military officials in Seoul say. A South... more

vincius
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Rupert Murdoch could block Google searches entirely

Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online.

bansheewail
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Why Doesn't Exercise Lead To Weight Loss?

The New York Times' Well blog reports that 'for some time, researchers have been finding that people who exercise... more

Tyrannous
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Iran Charges 3 Americans With Spying

Three American hikers who were arrested in Iran this summer after straying across its border with Iraq have been accused of spying, an Iranian state news agency reported on Monday.

The Tehran prosecutor told Iran’s official IRNA news agency that Iranian officials were pursuing espionage charges against the Americans, who were detained in late July after trekking through the Kurdistan region of Iraq and toward the Iranian border. News of the spying accusations drew a quick rebuke from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who reiterated calls for the Iranians to release the hikers, Shane M. Bauer of Emeryville, Calif.; Joshua F. Fattal of Cottage Grove, Ore.; and Sarah E. Shourd of Oakland, Calif.

“We believe strongly that there is no evidence to support any charge whatsoever,” she told reporters in Berlin, according to The Associated Press. “And we would renew our request on behalf of these three young people and their families that the Iranian government exercise compassion and release them so they can return home.”

It was unclear whether Iran had formally filed legal action against the hikers, or whether prosecutors were merely leveling accusations for public consumption. The Persian word used by the chief prosecutor who discussed the case can mean either “charged” or “accused” in English.

Nevertheless, the specter of three American tourists on trial in Iran could add more strain to relations between Iran the United States at a time when the countries are engaged in fraught negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, and it raises questions about whether Iran will try to use the captured Americans as a bargaining chip in those talks. Earlier this year, the case of Roxana Saberi, an Iranian-American journalist arrested in Tehran, drew international attention and sparked accusations that the Iranian government was trying to use one woman’s arrest to gain leverage with the United States.

Ms. Saberi, a freelance journalist who had lived in Iran since 2003, was arrested in January and sentenced to eight years prison on charges of espionage and working without press credentials. But the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wrote a letter urging an appeals court to be fair as it reviewed her case, and she was released in May, a month before Iran’s disputed presidential elections.

The United States has been pursuing the release of the American hikers through Swiss diplomats who represent American interests in Tehran. The United States severed diplomatic ties with Iran after the 1979 takeover of its embassy in Tehran.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/world/middleeast/10hikers.htmlThree American hikers who were arrested in Iran this summer after straying across its border with Iraq have been accused of... more

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The 11/9 Anniversary

Today, November 9, is the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Today is the real 9/11. This is not meant as a quibble about dates. Future historians will remember 9 November 1989 as far more significant than that terrifying day in September eight years ago. Countless long-forgotten events have been marked in headlines as the day we shall all remember. But nobody can doubt that the world changed on that wonderful night in Berlin.

When the Berlin Wall fell, communism died. Events have moved on fast since then. A new clash of civilisations – or in many ways an old one – began to surface. Now it is hard for anyone under about 40 to remember communism. To recap: it was that once idealistic, inspirational creed promising equality, freedom from exploitation and the creation of a new perfect humankind. The problem was that people had an annoying refusal to be perfected.

Almost always communism was imposed at the point of a gun and created labour camps and bread queues. The Stalins, Mao Zedongs and Pol Pots turned communism into the bloodiest social experiment of all time. History will mark 9 November 1989 as the day it was seen off as a miserable failure.

Again, we should try to look back. Less than a generation ago a third of our continent was under military occupation by a foreign superpower. The Soviet Union had around 750,000 troops stationed in central Europe. Hundreds of nuclear missiles were aimed at western cities, while the Nato countries had hundreds targeted at Budapest, Warsaw and so on. As easyJet and Ryanair take us on weekend breaks to Berlin or Bucharest, we should recall how unwelcoming and lugubrious these places were 20 years ago. Their people, imprisoned behind an iron curtain of electrified fences and minefields, were crying out to be free.

Then there was the wall in our heads, on both sides of the divide. For most of the four decades before 1989, communism was a real threat to our way of life. Two generations were brought up to fear the Soviet monolith. There were nuclear scares (the Cuban missile crisis) and the cold war fuelled proxy wars on other continents, such as Angola and the Soviet conflict in Afghanistan. Culturally, we were fed on spy thrillers and movies with the reds as the enemy.

All that changed in 1989. The collapse of communism inspired liberation elsewhere, most dramatically in South Africa, where apartheid could have survived longer. Nelson Mandela was released three months after the fall.

A downside to this story is that 9 November led directly to 11 September. The end of the cold war opened a door for Osama bin Laden. But Islamic fundamentalism is not a threat to western-style democracy as communism was. Obviously there will be converts, and all demographic graphs show that the number of Muslims will increase. But it is unlikely that Islam will appeal to the sort of western minds who were once attracted by socialist thinkers in the European intellectual tradition.

Terrorism is not a cause; it is a weapon, as Trotsky observed. Modern terrorist groups are a threat to many lives and will continue to be so. But to our way of life? Only if we choose to make it so. Outside the mind of an al-Qaida fanatic, it is fanciful to imagine that any day in London, Paris, Rome or Budapest imams will be in charge of governments sanctioning sharia law. In 1989, communist party apparatchiks ran a dozen now free European states, quite apart from the communist revolutions exported to the third world.

Last, but not least, 9 November was gloriously happy. Anything seemed possible that night. 11 September was a day that sparked panic and fear. I know which is a better 9/11 to remember.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/08/september-11-berlin-wall-communismToday, November 9, is the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Today is the real 9/11. This is not meant as a... more