Last Friday, I wrote “New Orleans”. No-one wants the opening sentence of “New Orleans” to be untrue more deeply than I. I am grateful that it has not been substantiated, and willingly re-tract that sentence.

Some readers have responded to “New Orleans” by sharing my sadness at all...

RETRACTION: The claim in the first sentence in my post was incorrect. I had been told this was happening, but these claims have turned out to be unsubstantiated. I therefore retract them -- but stand behind everything else I wrote without reservation.

It is reported that black hurricane victims in...

Thousands of black refugees sit along a sun-roasted New Orleans concrete overpass. Having waded through an urban swamp while wracked by hunger, thirst, and a desperate fear of dying, they appear at a loss for any further course, save waiting for the help that does not come. Miles to...

Two days ago, Hugo Chavez, the democratically elected president of Venezuela, defended his government’s policy of providing oil to poor nations at concessional prices.

Yesterday, Reverend Pat Robertson, the influential American religious leader and former presidential candidate, said that the United States should kill President Chavez for spreading “communism.”...

I am plagued by a cheerless intuition that 10 years from now, we will all look back upon the Live-8 extravaganza as one of the greatest public relations frauds ever perpetrated against the African continent.

While it is not yet clear who will be caused to bear the...

A few weeks before the insurgency in Iraq got rolling nearly two years ago, I learned from casual inquiry that the insurgents had long envisioned the war in Iraq as two wars, not one. In the first war, they foresaw heedless American forces making short work of storming the country...

One could call it a variation on Murphy’s Law. Those who have the power to do virtually anything, sooner or later, do just that. Our nation’s behavior in Iraq will likely be remembered by historians as a sad, small proof of this maxim.

In an effort to...

In early December 1967, I sat in the stacks of the Harvard Law School Library studying torts notes. I had no notion that events of that morning would tie themselves together so indelibly in my memory.

My face still warm with embarrassment and anger, I absently tossed my...

Latin America’s major nations have balked at an American plan to establish under the aegis of the Organization of American States a permanent committee to oversee the exercise of democracy in the hemisphere.

At first blush, one might infer from the reluctant countries’ reaction that they are less enthusiastic...

I can no longer bear it. Even at the risk of being misunderstood. Of committing a gaffe of some magnitude or other - - a breach of some protocol, for instance, that I may not have heard of. Or, of some unwritten rule whose provenance no-one remembers anymore.

I want...

de • moc • ra • cy noun pl cies
A government in which the supreme power is vested in
the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly
through a system of representation usually involving
periodically held free elections.

The common people...

“The Axe forgets, but not the tree.”
- African proverb.

What are they thinking?

In their practical silence. Inside the closed space of their strategic multi-ethnic inscrutability. The faceless billions who scratch for survival on an endangered planet they played no role in jeopardizing. The traditional indigenous people...