If you're tired of music festivals that require you to endure muddy mosh pits, stifling tents and rapaciously priced bottles of water, consider an escape to the plunging cliffs, turquoise waters and weathered citadels of Corsica. Every year, amid this Mediterranean island's gorgeous surroundings, musicians gather under the stars for Les Nuits de la Guitare . Since its humble beginnings more than 20 years ago in the hillside village of Patrimonio, the event has brought together virtuosos ...

For almost all major politicians, life is never private. Silvio Berlusconi is a fine example. Even if one wanted to, it would be hard not to know the latest about his family life, indeed his various dalliances. Politicians across the western world usually just have to deal with life in a fishbowl. Except for one: Berlusconi's old friend and vacation mate, Vladimir Putin, who has managed to impose an information blockade around his private life that most ...

On April 5, a little-known Russian Senator and diplomat, Mikhail Margelov, published an article called "The Arab World Is Changing," in which he argued that Russia is well-placed to act as mediator in the war in Libya, but it should think hard about the political risks. "We have too much going on in our own country," he wrote. "We have elections coming up." Two months on, the junior diplomat is starting to look prophetic. With the war at ...

On Thursday, as NATO war planes prepared fresh strikes against the compound of Muammar Gaddafi, his prime minister, Baghdadi al-Mahmudi, put in an urgent call to Moscow. After months of civil war, he said, Gaddafi was ready to negotiate a ceasefire and he needed Russia to mediate the talks. That same day in the French resort town of Deauville, the French and U.S. presidents, who have been leading the bombing raids against Gaddafi, reportedly came to their ...

In Rialto, on old route 66 just outside Los Angeles, young Mexican Americans in sharp cars and glittery, cowboy-goth clothes are pouring into a hangar-size nightclub to hear El Komander sing. Brawny, buzz-cut and with a midnight pallor, El Komander looks as if a Mexican drug cartel might have sent him on a summer internship with the Russian mob. He's wearing a black satin cowboy outfit with flashes of silver lightning embroidered on its sleeves. His narcocorridos — narco ballads ...

On Friday, before an audience of military officers from around the world, Russia's top generals made a startling admission of weakness. After 2015, they said, Russia may no longer be able to launch a nuclear strike against the West, because the planned U.S. missile shield over Europe would by then be advanced enough to blow Russian rockets out of the sky. This eventuality, which Russia's top brass have never admitted before, would finally dislodge the Cold War ...

It looked at first like the chance of a lifetime, if not a millennium. On April 10, when Polish President Lech Kaczynski and his entourage died in a plane crash in eastern Russia, the flood of grief from the Russian people struck such a chord in Poland that the long history of war, betrayal and oppression between the countries finally seemed to turn a corner. For the first time since anyone could remember, the two nations' leaders ...

It was impossible to pinpoint the exact moment of the transformation, but by the time Russian President Dmitri Medvedev left the podium after his first big press conference on Wednesday, he had morphed into a lame duck. The problem was not so much that he failed to state his plans for re-election next year, but, as some members of his own circle now admit, the President seemed to be courting a constituency of just one man — ...

By all appearances, Noah Lottick of Kingston, Pa., had been a normal, happy 24-year-old who was looking for his place in the world. On the day last June when his parents drove to New York City to claim his body, they were nearly catatonic with grief. The young Russian-studies scholar had jumped from a 10th-floor window of the Milford Plaza Hotel and bounced off the hood of a stretch limousine. When the police arrived, his fingers were still clutching $171 ...

Israel's domestic culture war between religious communities and the secular courts took to the streets on Thursday as tens of thousands of ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews paralyzed the streets of Jerusalem and the Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak in a protest march. The target of their outrage was the imprisonment of 43 couples for refusing to allow their daughters to attend a religious school where they would have to mix with the daughters of religious Mizrahi ...