They both took off their baseball caps, and under them -- yarmulkes. Dressed and bearded to the nines of Hasidic custom, these two Chabad rabbis had come via Dubai from Brooklyn to light...
(2) Comments | Posted December 12, 2011 | 7:00 AM
Iran and Israel have more in common than you might think. Enter the world's saltiest bodies of water -- this one is on Qeshm Island.
Qeshm lays 75 miles along Iran's southern coast at the mouth of the Straight of Hormuz. Every day, more than 15 million barrels of oil...
(7) Comments | Posted December 6, 2011 | 2:47 PM
As rumor had it, the one synagogue on the Arabian Peninsula was in Bahrain. It seemed like an easy find -- a sore thumb somewhere in two mile-wide downtown Manama. Earlier in the day the address I had plucked from an online forum, "Sasa'ah street," seemed to get vague grunts...
(6) Comments | Posted November 2, 2011 | 8:37 AM
I saw all fourteen of their eyes on me. Most gazed out from above noses wrinkled by smiles and even the expressionless ones seemed open to my whimsical appearance in a small room full of mattresses off a lonely backstreet in central Afghanistan. A single lightbulb hung from the ceiling,...
(2) Comments | Posted October 17, 2011 | 6:49 PM
The road from Kabul to the town of Bamiyan, nestled among sandstone cliffs 240 kilometers to the northwest, was far from busy. Despite the roadwork that had made it one of the smoother routes in the country, the drive from the capital through the 10,000-foot-high Shibar pass was less than...
(9) Comments | Posted October 13, 2011 | 6:25 PM
I had planned to ride over the river (a narrow offshoot of the Indus) and through the woods north of Islamabad to my friend's grandmother's house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The wolf would've been Osama bin Laden -- and he was already dead.
I landed in the Islamabad airport, only two hours...
(9) Comments | Posted December 25, 2011 | 8:09 AM