Crime Archive

SAN JOSÉ DEL GUAVIARE, Colombia — At a military base in this eastern town on the edge of the jungle, Juan Manual Santos, Colombia’s defense minister, recently delivered a triumphant appraisal of the country’s fight against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Just a few years ago, it would have it would have been hard to imagine staging such an event here, for fear of a guerrilla ambush. “We have chosen San José del Guaviare because it symbolized the old Colombia, a country ridden with narcotraffickers, paramilitaries and guerrillas,” said Santos as he addressed the country’s generals and elite troops […]

AUGUST BLUES — “August is the month when wars start,” wrote the late Al Aronowitz, the rock writer. Both World War I and II started in August, and now the Georgia-Russia conflagration has followed suit. In planning their attempt to retake South Ossetia, did the Georgians think the Russians would all be on vacation and not notice? Their second miscalculation was to forget the lesson of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and somehow believe that their patron, the United States, would step in. That’s what the Hungarians believed when they launched their revolution against the Soviet presence, based mainly on […]

Recent developments in a Swiss nuclear smuggling incident have reawakened global concern about the lasting damage the nuclear smuggling ring led by Abdul Qadeer Khan may have inflicted on the nuclear nonproliferation regime. Although it is unclear if, during his visit to Washington last week, U.S. authorities asked Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani for additional information about Khan, who has requested a relaxation of his terms of detention, recent revelations about the Swiss incident underscore the importance of continuing to investigate the ring. In 2004, German authorities arrested Swiss engineer Urs Tinner for allegedly aiding Libya’s now-abandoned nuclear program. […]