Harun Fazul, the senior al-Qaeda operative killed in Somalia last week, could have been captured at the start of his terror career fully 13 years ago. He had just overseen the crime that put the terrorist organization on the map: the Aug. 7 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi that killed more than 200 people and injured thousands. At that time, he ranked high enough to give orders to the men who detonated the massive ...

Is it the best of times or end times for public charter schools? 4,000 charter school leaders, teachers, advocates, and policymakers will gather in Atlanta later this month at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools' annual conference. The gathering of upstarts is now larger than many long-standing traditional education groups can muster, but in states and cities across the country, charter schools are facing increased political pressure and scrutiny. In Georgia, the state's ...

One billion people will die from tobacco-related causes by the end of the century if current consumption trends continue, according to a global report released Thursday by the World Health Organization . At a press conference held in midtown Manhattan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose charitable organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies, contributed $2 million to conduct the study, joined top WHO officials to present the findings. Among the litany of sobering statistics: 5.4 million people die each ...

"Remember the 1990s" retrospective lists always include Nirvana, Monica Lewinsky and Wayne's World, but leave out another major product that defined American life in the '90s: the health maintenance organization, or HMO — that nefarious health-insurance plan that seemed expressly designed to prevent you from seeing the doctor of your choice or receiving the treatments recommended by doctors, all under the guise of lowering costs and "improving" medical care. Of course HMOs are still around, but they ...

Fears are growing for the safety of a well-known Pakistani journalist who has been missing for 39 hours now and, according to an international advocacy group, is believed to be in the custody of the Pakistan's controversial Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence . Human Rights Watch declared that Saleem Shahzad, a reporter working for the Hong Kong-based Asia Times Online and Adnkronos International, the Italian news agency, could be subject to mistreatment and even torture while in custody. While ...

Biggest professional organization in the U. S. is the National Education Association, which numbers some 225,000 of the nation's 1,000,000 school teachers. But teachers, who in many communities are expected to be politically as well as physically chaste, seldom raise their voices outside the classroom. Consequently they are perennially startled at the bold talk that springs up at the N. E. A.'s annual conventions, attended chiefly by the outspoken fringe. Last week the 1,680 delegates and 12,000 visitors who ...

Even before Dominique Strauss-Kahn announced from New York's Riker's Island prison on Wednesday that he was stepping down as head of the International Monetary Fund , world powers were already jostling over who could replace him. Indeed, since Strauss-Kahn's arrest last Saturday on charges of attempted rape, European officials have been swift to argue that Europe should maintain the hold it has had on the IMF's top job ever since the Washington D.C.-based organization was created in 1945. Europeans, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, say ...

In southern Italy, the Mafia wars are heating up. On Monday, Italy will deploy an expected 80 soldiers into the city of Reggio Calabria, on the toe of Italy's boot, to provide security for anti-Mafia prosecutors who have been repeatedly threatened by the powerful 'Ndrangheta criminal organization. The ramped-up precautions come after a campaign of escalating intimidation of public officials, which has included death threats, envelopes with bullets in them, a homemade bomb that blew up in ...

Spring flowers bloomed and soldiers could be seen goose-stepping across Tiananmen Square as I walked through the recently renovated National Museum in Beijing. A new exhibit, "The Road of Rejuvenation," promised to highlight "the glorious history of China under the leadership of the Communist Party." So what's included in a permanent show that contains 2,220 "First-Rank Cultural Objects" and occupies roughly one-fifth of the massive museum's exhibition space? I made my way through room after room of obscure communist artifacts, ...

In May, David Steward, a former president of TV Guide, and his partner Pierre Friedrichs, a caterer, hosted an uncomfortably crowded cocktail party at their Manhattan apartment. It was a typical gay fund raiser--there were lemony vodka drinks with mint sprigs; there were gift bags with Calvin Klein sunglasses; Friedrichs prepared little blackened-tuna-with-mango-chutney hors d'oeuvres that were served by uniformed waiters. Billionaire philanthropist Edgar Bronfman Sr. was there; David Mixner, a gay activist and longtime friend of Bill Clinton's, was ...