If they held a convention for racial purity, I would never make the guest list. Like most other Latin American families, mine is a multiethnic stew that has left me with the generic black-eyed and olive-skinned look typical of large swaths of the world's population. My father's family is from Peru, my mother's from Chile. Their parents were born and reared in South America. Beyond that, I know nothing about my ancestors. That was fine by me--until the new and growing ...

"Who do you say that I am?" When Jesus posed this question to his disciples in Matthew's Gospel, Peter emphatically and faithfully replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And what might the answer be today? Three newly published scholarly books put forward a startlingly revisionist reply. While Jesus may have been a carpenter, that probably meant he was illiterate and belonged to a low caste of artisans. He did not preach salvation from sin through ...

Are western policies failing Burma? And is our veneration of Burmese democracy icon Aung San Suu Kyi partly to blame? These questions struck me at an exhibition in Bangkok by the Toronto-based photographer Anne Bayin. Amnesty International Canada called the show "a striking illustration of [Suu Kyi's] plight." But it gave me the creeps. For some photos, Bayin asked famous people such as Desmond Tutu and Vaclav Havel to express solidarity by holding a half-mask of Suu Kyi over their faces. ...

The young Eritrean woman was exhausted, famished and dehydrated after spending four days in March lost in the Mediterranean Sea. She had been on a fishing boat with nearly 300 African migrants, crammed so tightly that she couldn't move. But when Helen saw her rescuers, she couldn't help but feel a little worried. The last time she had seen an Italian military ship, things had not gone well. Twenty years old and six months pregnant, Helen is one ...

On a normal day, residents of Bin Jawad say, there is nothing remarkable about their sunny seaside town. Spread over desert hills sloping toward an azure Mediterranean Sea, Bin Jawad has a mostly apolitical Bedouin population. "It's a quiet town," says Salah, an engineer who lives in the town, which is barely a mile long from east to west. "Most of the people work in the oil companies nearby." But for the second time in ...

As the military action against Libya to give teeth to U.N. Security Resolution 1973 began, one question kept nagging away: Why, precisely, were the governments of Britain and France in the lead? Why were their armed forces taking part in the military action, and why had their diplomats done the grunt work in the negotiations that led to the adoption of Resolution 1973? It is not an easy question to answer. British Prime Minister David Cameron said that ...

There's usually not much common ground between a boy band singer and a far-right politician who would like to ban Muslim immigrants from his country. But in Britain this week, both have been at the center of fierce debates over freedom of speech. First, the pop idol. Stephen Gately was a star in Irish band Boyzone, which has sold about 30 million records since forming in 1993. Gately, 33, died on Oct. 10 of an acute pulmonary edema ...

Poland has agreed to host elements of the new U.S. missile defense plan despite initial surprise over the Obama administration's recent decision to overhaul President Bush's strategy. "We are ready to participate in the project," said Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who made the announcement Wednesday with Vice President Joe Biden in Warsaw. Biden said the United States was appreciative when Poland was willing to host an element of the now-scrapped missile defense plan proposed by the Bush administration and ...

Under a canopy of elegant Italian pines, the foundations of a mini Roman Coliseum are at once unmistakable and exhilarating. The structure at "Portus," the Romans' ancient Mediterranean port, has remained undiscovered for eighteen centuries until now. University of Southhampton archaeologists have just this summer uncovered the remains of an amphitheater, a Roman warehouse and the ruins of an Imperial palace even though archaeologists have been digging at this site since the 19th Century. "It's true I think ...

Two firefighters died Sunday afternoon as a fast-spreading wildfire in Los Angeles County grew to more than 42,000 acres, a fire official said. "I have some sad news to report," Deputy Fire Chief Michael Bryant told reporters. "Two of our firefighters were in a vehicle and went over the side and both of them suffered ... life-ending injuries." The accident happened near Acton, about 25 miles north of central Los Angeles during "intense fire activity that was occurring near Mount ...