WASHINGTON--For a man who has spent ten of the past 14 years as the only inmate of a Turkish island prison on the Sea of Marmara, Abdullah Öcalan knows how to make his voice heard. Last month, the longtime leader of Turkey's outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) had...

WASHINGTON-In the western media's telling, the civil war in Syria began and continues as a morality play, good versus evil, and for good reason. The regime headed for nearly a decade and a half by Bashar al-Assad has pursued policies of extreme brutality, including large-scale executions of rebellious groups' women...

WASHINGTON--In Washington, D.C. today, the White House was taken over by North Korean terrorists. With the help of a rogue Secret Service agent, the President and his senior advisors have been taken hostage. The terrorists' leader, blaming the U.S. for his parents' death during the Korean War, intends to obtain...

Playing in theaters across the United States is a film called "Upside Down," about an alternate universe where twin worlds sit stacked like bread in a sandwich, separated by opposite gravities. If our world could somehow have a similar twin, last month would have marked the tenth anniversary...

BANGKOK--Imagine for a minute that Hillary Clinton is elected president of the United States in 2016. Imagine that within days of being sworn into office, there are widespread rumors that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, is actually running the government. Imagine friends of the First Couple being quoted at...

MANDALAY--Reading the news that the Chinese army systematically hacked into United States computer networks brought to mind another group of soldiers who engaged in an entirely different kind of hacking here seven decades ago: Merrill's Marauders. What makes them most memorable is that it was one...

YANGON -- Towering high above the center of this ancient city, the Shwedagon Pagoda is one of the great wonders of the religious world. Said to be encased in more than sixty tons of gold, the Shwedagon is older than the city itself. Its earliest legend goes back...

WASHINGTON -- On December 4, 2008, exactly 40 years after returning from a tour as an infantryman in the Vietnam War, United States Senator Chuck Hagel spoke of peace. "When I think of jobs and improving people's conditions," he told the nonpartisan Israel Policy Forum, "I think of...

LONDON -- In global affairs, nothing can be so hard to see as the obvious, if it is big enough. Nowhere is this truer than in the transformation of the international diplomatic and security system now underway. Before our eyes -- if not yet in strategic planning -- the map...

LONDON -- In December 1991, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, United States Secretary of State James Baker gave a speech at Princeton University on the relationship between the U.S. and the "Newly Independent States" of the former USSR. In his remarks, Baker took...

WASHINGTON-- On November 12, 1893 -- 119 years ago today -- Afghanistan's Amir Rahman Khan and Britain's Foreign Secretary for India, Sir Mortimer Durand, drew a line across the roof of the world. Running roughly 1,600 miles through the rugged peaks of Afghanistan and present-day Pakistan, the Durand...

WASHINGTON -- Had the course of history taken a modest swerve, the United States and Kurdistan might have celebrated their independence on the very same day. It was July 4, 1187 -- 825 years ago -- that Saladin, Islam's greatest ruler, defeated 20,000 outmatched Crusaders at the bloody...

By Stanley Weiss and Tim Heinemann

WASHINGTON -- Both political parties should be ashamed.

Through the last three debates, we Americans have listened to such bumper sticker one-liners as "GM is alive and bin Ladin is dead" and "I know how to run a business." We have heard new slants...

JAKARTA--Anies Baswedan, the brilliant and thoughtful young president of Paramadina University here in this capital city, beams as he describes Indonesia Mengajar. Akin to the Teach For America program in the United States, Baswedan's initiative sends dedicated young Indonesians to remote regions of this sprawling archipelago, where they...

JAKARTA--Five years ago, one of the most respected soldiers in U.S. history died too soon. Wayne Downing was a West Point graduate and four-star general who served two tours in Vietnam and came out of retirement after 9/11 to serve as anti-terrorism advisor to President George...

GSTAAD -- When Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan met last month with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin about the civil war in Syria, political biographers had a right to be confused. After all, one is the leader of a government that has imprisoned more journalists than China and...

LONDON -- It was the most closely-watched Congressional race of 2000, and the most expensivein the history of the United States. When the dust settled, Hillary Rodham Clinton raised her right hand and took her seat in the United States Senate. As perhaps the most prominent...

It's a measure of Nazi effectiveness in destroying the centers of Jewish learning that when Israel was created in 1948, there were just 400 ultra-Orthodox Jewish men in the entire state. Aware of the desire to revive Jewish religious study after the Holocaust, Israel's first prime...

PARIS -- Forty-nine years ago last week, a 17-year-old Jonathan Netanyahu -- having recently arrived in America from Israel with his parents and two younger brothers -- wrote a remarkable letter to a friend back home. "Man does not live forever, and he should put the days of...

Dear Governor,

You first became a candidate for public office 18 years ago, when you ran for the United States Senate in Massachusetts against the incumbent, Edward Kennedy. The Senate you aspired to join then included a number of Republicans -- from Bob Dole to William...