Foreign Affairs

Osama bin Laden’s new album “More Attacks Forthcoming” on the iTunes Music Store! [Courtesy The Daily Show with Jon Stewart; January 19, 2006]

Everyone, please send good thoughts to my buddy Benjamin Harvey, who is covering the bird flu situation in eastern Turkey. He’s been keeping a blog about his experiences on Washingtonpost.com — two days ago he reported being sick. I hope he’s ok. Keep up the good work, Ben.

Wow, my friends are just all over the place lately. Tom Grove just had his first piece published in Wired magazine, in the January issue! It’s about selling satellite dishes in Turkish Kurdistan: Mustafa Özgen’s borrowed Ford Turbo bumps along a Turkish dirt road, 13 miles from the border with Syria. Özgen rumbles past dilapidated houses, abandoned during the country’s prolonged war with Kurdish separatists. In the back of his truck, satellite TV dishes are stacked neatly on their sides…

1) Turducken is in effect. It went into the oven at 5:50 am local time this morning. Due to come out about 7:00 pm and served at about 8:00 pm. Pictures coming later. I also made Apple Pie with Whiskey-Soaked Cherries (substituting kirschwasser for whiskey) and Sugar-Free Fudge. 2) The US has a plan to invade Canada. Really. 3) Abduraahman Wahid, the former president of Indonesia has a great Op-Ed in yesterdays’ WSJ entitled: “Right Islam vs. Wrong Islam”. 4)…

Big ups to my Columbia buddy Benjamin Harvey, a reporter for the Associated Press, who is doing an excellent job of covering the trial of Turkey’s best novelist, Orhan Pamuk. By BENJAMIN HARVEY Associated Press Writer © 2005 The Associated Press ISTANBUL, Turkey — Turkey’s foremost novelist goes on trial Friday in Istanbul in a free-speech case that has divided the nation, embarrassed its liberals and cast a pall over its dream of joining the European Union. For Europeans who…

Hi, I’m President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Either I’m trying to get the world really really pissed off at me, or I’m just being an idiotic asshole. You decide. BBC: “If European countries claim that they have killed Jews in World War II… why don’t they provide the Zionist regime with a piece of Europe,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Iranian television. “Germany and Austria can provide the… regime with two or three provinces for this regime to establish itself, and the issue will…

Indian Economist Atanu Dey: I know that one should not ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained as stupidity. Not everyone involved in the “laptop for every child” is motivated by greed; some are motivated by a zeal that comes from an inability to figure out what the problem is and how it can be most effectively solved. The operative word is “effectively.” You can always use a cannon where a fly-swatter is sufficient. But for the cost of…

The New York Times is currently running a great series on the modernization of India, looking particularly at highways and automobiles so far. This section pretty much encapsulates the same dilemma that is going through the rest of the developing world: India’s state-run rail network may have been built by the British, but it came to represent a certain egalitarianism. Powerful and voiceless, rich and poor – all navigated the same chaotic, crowded stations and rode the same jam-packed trains,…

BBC: “We will always be Muslims, Serbs or Croats,” said Veselin Gatalo of the youth group Urban Movement Mostar. “But one thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.”

Rolling Stone: John Walter Rendon Jr. rises at 3 a.m. each morning after six hours of sleep, turns on his Apple computer and begins ingesting information — overnight news reports, e-mail messages, foreign and domestic newspapers, and an assortment of government documents, many of them available only to those with the highest security clearance. According to Pentagon documents obtained by Rolling Stone, the Rendon Group is authorized “to research and analyze information classified up to Top Secret/SCI/SI/TK/G/HCS” — an extraordinarily…