Try not to forget what you saw last week. You say now that it would be impossible to forget: Filipinos armed to the teeth with rosaries and flowers, / massing in front of tanks, and the tanks stopping, and some of the soldiers who were the enemy embracing the people and their flowers. Call that a revolution? Where were the heads stuck on pikes? Where were the torches for the estates of the rich? The rich were in the streets ...

Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the militant Shi'ite Hizballah, vowed Saturday that members of his organization indicted last week for assassinating a former Lebanese prime minister would never be turned over to an international tribunal. In a 75-minute televised address in Beirut, Nasrallah attacked the credibility of the Netherlands-based Special Tribunal for Lebanon, using video footage to back his claims that it is biased against Hizballah and serving the interests of the United States and Israel. "We know ...

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 Nouvel Observateur. PARIS All of France is abuzz Friday with news of the overnight story by the New York Times reporting that the sexual assault case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn was "on the verge of collapse." The U.S. newspaper reported that prosecutors had growing doubts about the credibility of the ...

People love guys who write constitutions. Their genius is celebrated by historians, their intentions debated by judges, their names attached to poorly performing middle schools. I figured I would never know that glory. Because no matter how good my columns may be, they will never cause people to stop drinking and then start drinking again shortly afterward, except for me while I write them. And not always. But after the financial crash in Iceland, the new Prime Minister decided to ...

"Smiling Achille" van Acker went to his native Bruges to celebrate 25 years of happy marriage. Then he came back to Brussels to face a crisis in the uneasy union of Socialists, Liberals and Communists which he had held in precarious balance for three months.It was a member of his own Socialist party, Senator Henri Rolin, stubbornly fighting Minister of Justice Adolphe van Glabbeke over a secondary juridical matter, who brought about the downfall of Premier van Acker's Government. When Van Acker demanded a vote of confidence, hotheaded ...

Sonthi Boonyaratglin must have armor-plated gonads. How else to explain it? Five years ago, as an army general, he led a military coup that overthrew Thailand's then Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. Now retired and running in the country's July 3 parliamentary election, he presents the coup as a brave and selfless act. "I'm glad we did it," says Sonthi, who commands his Matubhum Party from a spartan Bangkok office. "If we hadn't, Thailand might no longer be a democracy." Sonthi's presence ...

The fallout from Fukushima continues. Concerns about an effort by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi to revive his country's nuclear power program helped drive millions of Italians to the polls June 13, when they voted overwhelmingly to block any such revival amid safety concerns following the meltdown in March of the Japanese plant. Berlusconi's name didn't appear on the ballots, which also offered voters the opportunity to overturn laws governing the privatization of water and a ...

Turkish democracy is alive and kicking. Yes, conservative Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan — under fire for his authoritarian leanings — won Sunday's elections with a landslide 50% of the vote, basking in the longest period of economic prosperity in the country's recent memory. But his Justice and Development Party fell short of a sought-after two thirds "supermajority" which would have allowed him to change the country's founding principles without seeking the opposition's consent. And, as a ...

Early in the evening of June 7, children swarmed in front of the Virgin Mary Church in Cairo's Imbaba slum, carrying pink carnations. They were there to greet Egypt's interim Prime Minister, Essam Sharaf, who had arrived to inaugurate the $1 million rebuilding of the church, which had been burned in an outbreak of sectarian strife in May. But while the initial wave of violence, in which 15 people were killed, made front-page headlines around the world and stoked fears ...

The death toll from the battle between Jamaican security forces and supporters of alleged drug lord Christopher Coke that erupted over the weekend reached 30 on Tuesday with no end yet in sight. But whether or not Jamaican authorities succeed in apprehending Coke, who faces extradition to the U.S., the mayhem threatens to bring down Prime Minister Bruce Golding — a shake-up that would be welcomed by many crime-weary Jamaicans. As a front-page editorial Tuesday in the daily ...