The way the pro-Palestinian activists on the Freedom Flotilla II see it, Israel has managed to extend the sea blockade of Gaza to Greece. First, there was the anonymous safety complaint that docked the U.S. ship, The Audacity of Hope, and prompted Greek authorities to conduct a still-ongoing investigation of its seaworthiness. After that, there was the mysterious damage to the propeller shaft of a Greek-Swedish-Norwegian passenger boat. Then, on Friday, the Greek government forbade all ships bound for Gaza ...

Kansas' efforts to shut down two abortion providers will have to wait as a federal judge temporarily blocked the state Friday from imposing tough new licensing restrictions. U.S. District Judge Carlos Murguia, reading from the bench, issued a preliminary injunction, saying providers and women would suffer "irreparable" injury if the regulations took effect Friday as scheduled. The injunction will hold until a trial determines the legality over rules that, among other things, mandate the size of janitors' closets ...

Kansas will now just have one clinic in the state allowed to provide abortions, as the state signaled Thursday that Kansas' only other two providers are out of business due to tough, new licensing requirements. Advocates of abortion rights allege it's part of a coordinated, national campaign to limit a woman's access to reproductive freedom, while abortion opponents argue Kansas' new rules merely aim to protect the health of women or a viable fetus. "This is ...

In 1960 chocolate-skinned Robert Sobukwe, 38, head of the black nationalist Pan-African Congress, was sentenced to three years in jail for "incitement to riot." As his release date drew near last week, Sobukwe, a slim onetime university lecturer, was hustled from the maximum-security prison in Pretoria to a bleak detention camp on Robben Island in Table Bay, six miles from Cape Town. There he learned, just the day before he was to receive freedom, that South Africa's Parliament had rammed through a ...

Fifty thousand Egyptians crowded under a vast, quilted tent in Cairo's Republic Square one evening last week to hear Premier Gamal Abdel Nasser proclaim his long-promised constitution. This was the moment when Egypt was to pass from military dictatorship to "republican and democratic government." To mark the switch, Nasser and his eight-man junta had resigned their army commissions. They took their places on the platform wearing civilian clothes. "The true revolution begins today," orated Nasser. "The whole people will constitute a supreme council for the revolution." "Ascha ...

The movement she started will grow to be, a hundred years from now, the most influential of all time," predicted futurist and historian H.G. Wells in 1931. "When the history of our civilization is written, it will be a biological history, and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine." Though this prophecy of nearly 70 years ago credited one woman with the power that actually came from a wide and deep movement of women, no one person deserves it more. Now ...

I hate gas grills. Perhaps hate is too strong a word. No, hate is the word. While I love gas ranges, and only wish I still had one instead of the electric coils beneath ceramic glass in my new apartment, when it comes to outdoor meat cookery, gas is a perversion and a corruption, effete and decadent. It justifies every jeer we heard from behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War: voices that said that America ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Le Monde. The Strauss-Kahn affair, which began in a Sofitel hotel room, shows that writing endless editorials or making sermons predicting the future does not get us any closer to the truth. When dealing with politics, French media usually call in a troop of editorial writers, rebaptized "commentators," whereas Anglo-Saxon newspapers, even if they ...

For days beforehand, news stories went round the world direly reporting that nothing less than freedom itself was at stake in Sicily. And as the time came for Sicilians to elect a new regional assembly, Christian Democratic orators by the Fiat-ful raced about the island tirelessly echoing the warning of Italy's Premier Antonio Segni: "We must be on our guard if we are not to awaken in the bear hug of Communism." Last week, in hundreds of arid mountain villages ...

As white and Negro Freedom Riders continued their rolling assault against segregation last week, they produced some profound results in South and North alike: In Washington, Attorney General Robert Kennedy urged the Interstate Commerce Commission to start enforcing the vaguely worded federal ban on segregation in restaurants, waiting rooms and toilets at interstate bus terminals. The ICC in 1955 outlawed segregated seating in interstate buses. But that rule is rarely obeyed in the South, and the ICC has acted against only one offending bus line, which ...