Midday on Wednesday, June 29, France erupted in an "explosion of joy" on learning that Hervé Ghesquière and Stéphane Taponier had been released by the Taliban after 547 days in captivity. Reporters in Afghanistan for state-run television France 3, the two men were flown home the following day....

I have been living in Paris while witnessing momentous events, from revolutions in North Africa to earthquakes in Japan, but by far the biggest story for the French this year was the arrest on May 14 of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund, after being accused by a...

As we commemorate the thirty-fifth anniversary of the fall--or is it the liberation?--of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the Vietnam war is again a hotly-contested issue. Today the skirmishes are being fought on the battlefield of our collective memory, and, surprisingly, the issue is just as contentious in Vietnam as...

Torture works. Hanging from the yardarm works. Disembowelment, rape, death by stoning, electroshock -- they all work at terrorizing people and extracting information. But what kind of information? Useful information, as Dick Cheney maintains? Or a babble of disinformation directed at God, America, Allah, or anyone else who can make...

In May 2008, Warren Buffett, the great "value" investor from Omaha and America's second-richest man, announced on the eve of his annual shareholders' meeting that he had lost $1.6 billion in bad bets on derivatives. Most of this loss came from shorting put derivatives on Standard and Poor's Index of...