TUCSON, Arizona - Cocooned in our delusional state of exception, we Americans have achieved what eludes only the scariest of despotic states: We have obliterated truth.

When reality bites, we defang it. We stretch our most basic principles to accommodate profit and personal convenience. We soften ugly words so...

PARIS - Here's a hair-raising snippet from the towering babble of media debate, signed by a Richard Sine, that argues journalism schools should be abolished:

"You can pick up most media skills on the job, or with a few hours of instruction. If you screw up,...

PARIS - Navigating today's world is like flying an airliner in the proximity of geese. If we don't notice seemingly small realities ahead, something is certain to flock up our jets. Sully the pilot had a lifetime of training and lots of fancy instruments. We, the superpower people, have only...

PARIS - A poker-faced French border cop actually cracked a faint smile as he hefted my U.S. passport. Euphoria must fade inevitably in hard light but, even here, America is back.
It was that simple. A convincing plurality showed a doubtful world that the United States they once...

PARIS -- It may mean victory in America that a possible U.S. president can survive 90 minutes of debate without people bursting into laughter. Nowhere else.

With crib notes and cutesiness, Sarah Palin avoided what analysts call a "game-changing" moment. Soon after, she chanted to a crowd, "USA,...

PARIS -- For Republicans, Democrats, or diehard Whigs, why is there even a question about the most crucial election the world has ever seen?

The simplest basics should be enough:

Suppose the Neighborhood Watch captain you twice elected empties your freezer, steals your HD TV,...

Paris -- Here where a mousse involves chocolate, like elsewhere else in a world that is actually round and scarily complex, November looms with deep trepidation. If given the chance to vote, the world beyond America would likely choose Barack Obama by 90 percent. And we had better understand why...

PARIS - I finally lost it the other day when a TV newscaster mentioned in passing that two Dutch journalists were killed trying to cover Russia's march through Georgia.

Then in the New York Review of Books, Michael Massing noted that U.S. officers in Iraq vetted samples of his...

Weeks before snipers sparked war at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn in 1992, I visited a psychiatrist, silver-maned and clearly loony, at his Bosnian Serb party headquarters.

He jabbed a stick at a colorful grade-school map on a wall of the tiny office to show how Serbs would displace Muslims and...

If puzzle pieces are missing in the Roxanna Brown case, the picture is clear, a terrifying vignette of relinquished justice and lost humanity in America.

Roxanna, a U.S. citizen who ran Bangkok University's ceramics museum and fiercely opposed illegal dealings in Asian antiquities, came to lecture in Seattle in May.

Ask any reporter who knows brutal regimes: No hairs can be split over torture. Victims see no ambiguity. The memory stays fresh all their lives. More than pain, they recall smoldering contempt for their torturers.

You might have asked Baudouin Kayembe, the courageous owner of a weekly paper...

The Associated Press figured twice in recent New York Times items, and the first raised only a passing chuckle. But the two together ought to terrify us all.

With our planet in dire straits, the venerable AP reflected a ray of hope: "Paris Hilton is being praised by conservationists...

DANANG, Vietnam - Revisiting scenes of our crime, with those formidable bunkers now furry green and crumbling, I keep obsessing on Iraq. Back in 1968, Peter Arnett summed up futile war in a quote by an American major: "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it." Today, better...

SRINAGAR, Kashmir -- It is safe to say The Judge has black hair and dark Kashmiri eyes that can bore through zinc. Beyond that, it's risky. He is a man of conscience who speaks truths in low tones, and that can be fatal here.

We met via a person he...

NEW DELHI - At daybreak in the last remnants of world-class slums along the Yamuna, all the "India Shining" hype smells as foul as the fetid black river. This can't be what Gandhi had in mind, 60 years ago, when he brought down the British Raj to build an...

PARIS -- Like every Fifth Republic president elected to rule France, Nicolas Sarkozy is something of a democrat, a demagogue, and a demigod in a nation with all the societal order of cats around tuna. This time, however, plus ca change is out the window.

Charles de Gaulle is finally...