Fresh back from Damascus, I was taking my coffee on the Beirut Corniche this week when a neat little Greek warship hove into sight. I picked up my French mandate binoculars – they must have travelled in and out of Beirut many times between 1922 and 1946 – and espied that “F465” was the frigate’s…
“After a while, Samson said to the boy who was leading him: “Take me up to the front of the temple, so that I may stand by one of the pillars, and lean against it.” And while Samson stood between the two pillars, he prayed. Then he placed one arm around the pillar on one…
‘Chutzpah’ is a wonderful Yiddish word that means outrageous nerve, or unmitigated gall. This week’s Chutzpah Award goes to Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Standing in front of props of data files and cd’s, Netanyahu claimed Israel’s renowned Mossad spy agency had stolen a small mountain of secret Iranian nuclear data from a warehouse in…
Like any successful wheeler and dealer, Donald Trump knows how to make his clients feel valued. But, as Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron discovered last week, there’s a considerable difference between sincerity and salesmanship. PARIS – Barack Obama wasn’t very interested in Europe. Something which was made clear in 2010, when he didn’t even show…
At the spring meeting of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB), the head of the US Treasury Department, Steven Mnuchin, touched upon a delicate subject: the financing of IMF and WB members by China and several other developing countries. He called these countries “non-transparent creditors” that do not coordinate their operations with…
Between the US strikes on Syria in April and the recent developments on the Korean Peninsula, we are in somewhat of a lull in the Empire’s search for a new war to start. The always helpful Israelis, in the person of the ineffable Bibi Netanyahu, are now beating the drums for, well, if not a…
