Najam Sethi is no stranger to official harassment and death threats. Since the 1970s, the prominent Pakistani journalist has been charged with treason three times. He has been held incommunicado and even tortured. In more recent years, his name has appeared on a series of hit lists drawn up by militants enraged by his outspoken opposition to religious militancy. For the past two years, Sethi and his family have been forced to live under police protection. The hostile ...

Syria's President Bashar al-Assad used his third televised appearance in the three months since anti-regime protests first erupted to deliver a monotonous, rambling and technocratic speech to a handpicked audience at Damascus University on Monday — and while the autocratic leader promised a national dialogue, the offer is unlikely to damper the violent dissent rocking his country. There was little new in his more than hour-long address. In many ways, it was basically a repeat of his first speech before Parliament on March 30,

Getting pummeled by three men with kicks, punches and jabs is not how I typically spend my vacation. Yet there I was on Military Base 8 defending myself from a trio of Israeli attackers. But my assailants — brothers Avi and Shlomi Moyal and Haim Sasson — weren't trying to rob me, they were simply doing their job: training me to protect myself via the increasingly hip Israeli self-defense technique known as Krav Maga. Literally "close contact" in ...

Sirri Sureyya Onder is neither a Kurd nor a politician. Yet, when the popular filmmaker and writer was approached by Turkey's Kurdish party to run for an Istanbul parliamentary seat in Sunday's elections, he felt he could not refuse. "This parliament has an opportunity to make history," he said, between campaign stops at coffeehouses in Zeytinburnu, a working-class district near Istanbul's airport populated by Kurds who migrated here over the past three decades years to flee fighting ...

Tech pundits have a bizarre habit of declaring products dead long before they're actually goners. Me, I do my darndest to avoid the temptation to play premature coroner. I will say this, though: If the PC does end up mortally wounded someday, we may look back at early June of 2011 as the moment when its death warrant was signed. In the past eight days, Microsoft and Apple have shown off upcoming versions of their respective ...

Rarely has anything so small done so much to ruin so many hamburgers as E. coli bacteria has. It's not just the actual burgers they infect, it's the response they provoke, which ruins so many innocent, untainted ones. With the European outbreak growing to record proportions , you have to think that U.S. authorities will become even more vigilant in their hunt for E. coli Stateside. Part of that, inevitably, will involve overcooking hamburgers. In Europe, ...

An anthropologist finds a "living stone-age museum " On a chilly September night in 1982, three men approached a police checkpoint at the village of Lotsum, along the tense cease-fire line between India and Pakistan in the Himalayas. The travelers looked like ordinary Kashmiri peasants, and the guards let them pass. But one of them was not what he seemed. French Anthropologist Michel Peissel had disguised himself in garb like that of his two local guides, staining his face with ...

Southern Airways of Atlanta prides itself on its ante bellum hospitality. Its blue-and-yellow planes even have smile faces painted on the nose under the inscription HAVE A NICE DAY. But no one was smiling after one of the most theatrical and spectacularly prolonged episodes in the chronicles of skyjacking. Three men armed with pistols and a hand grenade boarded Flight 49 in Birmingham and took the 30 passengers and four crew members on an odyssey of terror that ended 29 ...

This is the tale of the enmity of three women: the first is perhaps the richest in Argentina; the second is the President of the country; the third, a grandmother in search of the children of desaparecidos, the 30,000 or so mostly young people who disappeared in the military junta's death camps from 1976 to 1983. The objects of their contention are two adopted children, a brother and sister, who stand to inherit an immense fortune — ...

It takes four seconds to fall the 220 feet from the Golden Gate Bridge to the waters of the San Francisco Bay below. In that brief instant, a falling body can reach speeds of 75 m.p.h. The impact is almost always fatal. Just three months after the bridge opened in 1937, a man jumped. Two years later, the California Highway Patrol officially asked the Golden Gate Bridge District to do something to stop the suicides. Now, more ...