Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, is a city that brings to mind three images: hospitality, khachapuri (a delicious cheese-filled heart attack encased in dough), and George W. Bush, whose larger-than-life visage graced the surface of numerous billboards on the stretch of road that linked the airport to the city in August 2005. The billboards went up after Bush visited Georgia in May 2005, and not long after that, this main drag officially became “George W. Bush Street.” Cab drivers got a kick out of pointing to the billboards and giving Americans smiles — the type people give each other to [...]
The good news is that U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rica turned up at the regional security forum in Malaysia. The bad news is that she broke with a 12-year tradition and didn’t give an amusing after-dinner performance. Her State Department predecessors were much more entertaining at the annual networking event of the Association of South East Nations (ASEAN). Madeleine Albright did an Eva Peron impersonation, and Colin Powell is remembered for singing the disco music hit YMCA. But Rice played a somber Brahms sonata on the piano in Kuala Lumpur to reflect, she said, the grim situation in the [...]
On Tuesday night July 25, Hasan Nasrallah gave a speech on al-Manar TV, the satellite station of Hizbullah. It was the fifth time he addressed the Lebanese since the war started July 12. Nasrallah looked calm, confident, and defiant when he announced that Phase Two of the war against Israel had started. During Phase One he had promised to bomb Haifa, the third-largest city in Israel, and he did. He also bombed Kiryat Shmona, Acre, Safad, Tiberias, and the Biblical city of Nazareth. The State of Israel had not witnessed similar attacks on its cities since the start of the [...]
