A combination of mistakes -- whether through ignorance or design -- and significant omissions of fact have left the American public misinformed about why the Palestinians have gone to the United Nations and what they are trying to achieve.

The biggest error repeated across the media in hundreds of headlines...

The most important line in President Obama's Libya speech, missed by most analysts, was this: "With the time and space that we have provided for the Libyan people, they will be able to determine their own destiny, and that is how it should be."

This one line contains the kernel...

Given the past decades of direct European control in Africa and the Middle East, and the more recent US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, it is more than understandable that Africans and Middle Easterners are highly suspicious of the precise motives for the NATO intervention in Libya.

President Obama...

CAIRO, Egypt -- I was sitting in a hotel room in Amman, Jordan staring at Omar Suleiman's grim face on television as he read his 20-second statement on Friday night that Hosni Mubarak had at last been deposed. As the screen showed the throng going nuts in Tharir Square, I...

CAIRO, Egypt -- I was sitting in a hotel room in Amman, Jordan staring at Omar Suleiman's grim face on television as he read his 20-second statement on Friday night that Mubarak had at last been deposed. As the screen showed the throng going nuts in Tharir Square, I booked...

Washington's failed attempts to stop two African genocides in the past 16 years has influenced a so-far successful U.S. drive to prevent a new war and mass killings in south Sudan, according to current and former U.S. officials.

On Sunday, southerners in Sudan began a week-long referendum to vote for...

The age of ideology in China may soon be ending. Caught between its longstanding opposition to independence movements worldwide and its expanding economic interests, Beijing finds itself remarkably choosing to court a separatist government in south Sudan.

The south is scheduled to vote on January 9 on independence from Khartoum...

I covered Richard Holbrooke for the Boston Globe when he was U.N. ambassador from 1999 to early 2001. I've covered about a dozen U.S. ambassadors at the U.N. since 1990. Holbrooke was the most engaging of them all.

One afternoon he invited me for lunch at his residence in...

"The word 'security' is a broad, vague generality whose contours should not be invoked to abrogate the fundamental law embodied in the First Amendment. The guarding of military and diplomatic secrets at the expense of informed representative government provides no real security for our Republic."-- Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black,...

Wally Hickel, the former Republican governor of Alaska, once told me how he appointed Ted Stevens to the Senate seat vacated by the death of Sen. Bob Bartlett in 1968.

I interviewed Hickel in his office in Anchorage in 2007. He told me he passed up the man who had...

If Wall Street hates Obama today for putting a cap on the salaries of executives taking a government bailout, he finds himself in the tradition of the president he is most compared to.

From the start of his presidency FDR stood up to Wall Street, who hated him in return....

Americans fought an eight-year war of liberation against not only the most powerful monarchy on earth in 1775 but against monarchy itself. Yet once the dust settled and it was time to write a Constitution compromises left America a legacy of monarchy now gone from most of Europe.

Among...

The trial of the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush was postponed on Tuesday. They are trying to decide whether to charge him with assaulting or just insulting Bush.

But Bush can pick up the phone today, call his Iraqi puppet Nuri al-Maliki, and tell him to...

The debate over whether to save the American auto industry with yet more billions of taxpayers' money is the wrong one. The discussion should be about how to wean America away from the car altogether.

Instead of sinking billions now and probably more billions later in propping up a...

Hubris on Wall Street and in Baghdad felled the imperious Republican Party. They had a vise-like grip on power and thankfully blew it. Obama happened to be a damned good candidate too.

He's pulling the country from the brink. This is a victory over massively misguided and failed policy. The...

Class is the real "C-word" in America. The pretense is that class is a European thing. The myth is since we cast off a monarchy at independence we are all somehow middle class.

Of course nothing is further from the truth. It is in the interest of the class...

10:00 President Lula of Brazil trashes speculators on Wall Street for undermining world markets and explains why governments are needed to regulate the irresponsible financiers.

10:14 Bush approaches podium for his last speech to the UN. Thankfully. Bush says the UN and other multilateral organizations are "needed now more than...

The moment I heard John McCain had chosen Sarah Palin I thought the decision had Karl Rove written all over it. Then Sidney Blumenthal wrote that Rove, who knows the American psyche like no other operative, wanted Mitt Romney and that Palin was McCain's call. Whoever chose her is...

"Listen people. When you sit at your one kitchen table and work out the family budget you are faced with choices. You only have so much money. So you have to decide between paying your kids' tuition or going on vacation. And you gotta go on vacation alone because you...

If I hear the word "dream" again during this Democratic Convention, I think I'll fling something at the screen. The time for dreaming is over. Harry Truman tried to bring us national health insurance and we're still dreaming about it. Europe has had public health care, free universities and a...