The shadowy Marxist rebel group that has rattled Mexico in recent months by bombing natural gas pipelines has a long history of financing its operations with kidnappings
With bombings, Mexican rebels escalate their fight
By James C. Mckinley
THE NEW YORK TIMES
MEXICO CITY
The shadowy Marxist rebel group that has rattled Mexico three times in recent months by bombing natural gas pipelines has a long history of financing its operations with the kidnappings of businessmen, prosecutors say.
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Fujimori faces trial, a reckoning for Peru
By Simon Romero
THE NEW YORK TIMES
LIMA, Peru
Both critics and admirers of the former Peruvian strongman Alberto K. Fujimori long argued that he deserved his day in court to explain the political killings, abductions and corruption during his rule. Fujimori even said so after Chile's Supreme Court ruled to extradite him last week, claiming this was part of a "strategy" to return to Peru.
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The Bush administration has joined a global chorus calling on the fund to rethink its priorities and its governance
Under Strauss-Kahn: IMF faces quesiton of identity
By Steven R Weisman
THE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON
A decade ago, the International Monetary Fund helped to stabilize the world economy after markets collapsed in Latin America, Russia and Asia. Though critics often have rued its interventionism, the fund was widely hailed as a heroic guardian of the global financial system.
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Blackwater USA has been involved in a far higher rate of shootings in Iraq than other security firms providing similar services to the State Department, officials say.
Blackwater tops firms in Iraq in shooting rate
By Landon Thomas
THE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON
The American security contractor Blackwater USA has been involved in a far higher rate of shootings while guarding American diplomats in Iraq than other security firms providing similar services to the State Department, according to Bush administration officials and industry officials.
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US needs ‘long-term’ in Iraq, Gates say
WASHINGTON
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates told Congress on Wednesday that he envisioned keeping five combat brigades in Iraq as a "long-term presence."
Gates told the Senate Appropriations Committee, "When I speak of a long-term presence, I'm thinking of a very modest U.S. presence with no permanent bases, where we...
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Senator Hillary Clinton's front-runner status is arguably as much a tribute to the quality of her campaign as to the candidate herself
Front-runner is a status vulnerable to change
By Adam Nagourney
THE NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON
Anyone wanting to understand why Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign is being praised these days in many quarters — including rival campaigns and the White House — needed to look no further than their televisions last
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Microsoft is taking solid aim at a business that is arguably outside its core competence: advertising
Microsoft takes aim at Google’s ad supremacy
By Louise Story
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Microsoft has used its might, clout and smarts to take on any number of products and services — the browser, the operating system, the portable music player, to name just three — with varying degrees of success.
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Britain’s buoyant borrow-and-spend era may be coming to an end, and there are accounts still to be settled
British stoicism is no match for easy credit
By Sarah Lyall
THE NEW YORK TIMES
LONDON
The scenes were jarring, incongruous, throwbacks to Depression-era America: panicky customers converging on bank branches across the country, desperate to withdraw their money before it was too late.
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The US housing bubble: they cried wolf — they were right
By Vikas Bajaj
THE NEW YORK TIMES
In May of 2004, Dean Baker, an economist in Washington who had been warning about excesses in the housing market, sold his two-bedroom condo after concluding that the market had lost its moorings from reality.
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Editoral Roundup
Corriere della Sera
— on the situation in Afghanistan MILAN, Italy
Once it rapidly completed military operations (in Afghanistan) ... the Bush administration, engaged in preparations for the war in Iraq, devoted little attention to the management of the country and its political and economic reconstruction. Then, political responsibilities for the future...
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World of wine
Moonlight wine, the next popular fad?
By Dereck Foster
for the Herald
Making wine is simple — in theory. All that is necessary is healthy, ripe grape, a temperature sufficient to induce fermentation, some sort of filtering device, and that´s about it. Far too simple for most winemakers who have, over the centuries, sought constantly to improve and add to this simple scheme of things.
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Is that so?
Was yesterday better?
By Howard Nelson
for the Herald
Memory can be tricky, and memory can be sly. Memory can lead us to believe even when we know — or feel — that what we are recalling was not so, or at least was rather different This is a factor which historians must take into account when attempting to set down for contemplation today, what happened yesterday.
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Robert Frank: truth over art in photography
By Marjan Groothuis
FOR THE HERALD
The Museum of Latin-American Art Isaac Fernández Blanco did it again. Once more they are presenting an impressive photography show, this time round over seventy pictures by Robert Frank. This Swiss photographer, born in Zürich in 1924, travelled to New York in 1947.
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Museums by night
Buenos Aires is a city that never seems to sleep, least of all during the 'Noche de los Museos' (Night of the Museums) which will be held on Saturday, October 6th from 7 pm to 2 am. The event, a Berlin initiative dating back to 1977, was organized for the...
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The colour is on the wall
By Alfredo Cernadas
FOR THE HERALD
What first strikes the viewer’s eye upon entering the gallery is a gust of colour that pours from the walls and surrounds him/er as if he/she had stepped into an enchanted forest, to the passionate strains of a Berlioz overture. Indeed, a symphony of saturated hues (scarlet, emerald green, purple, black, ochre, most notably) vibrates on the (mostly) large canvasses.
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BA’s Antiquarian Book Fair 2007 opens on Wednesday
Out to entice antique book buyers
By Shaké Balian
FOR THE HERALD
"When the cinema was invented people said that the end of illustrated books had come, when television was invented, they said that illustrated books had come to an end, as well as when the Internet, computers, photocopies were invented. When facsimiles of antique books were printed, they thought that nobody would buy the originals any longer. All the inventions that have sprung have not put an end to books. Books have actually turned them to their advantage, as with the Internet, which gave readers universal and democratic access to contemporary and antique books."
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The National Art Gallery in Islamabad, Pakistan, which opened last month, has brought new texture to an otherwise sterile, highly planned capital
An outpost of the arts, secured by a military dictator
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan
It may be the towering black burqa-clad figures that stand at the entrance, or the brickwork, portholes and curved aluminum skylights of the building itself. Either way, the National Art Gallery, which opened last month, has brought new texture to this otherwise sterile, highly planned capital.
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Italy and Getty museum sign pact on artifacts
ROME
In a low-key ceremony, the Italian Culture Ministry and the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles signed an agreement here on Tuesday under which the museum will hand over 40 archaeological artifacts that Italy says were looted from its soil.
It was an anticlimactic coda to nearly two...
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A dispute over a Klimt purchased in New York
By Robin Pogrebin
The NEW YORK TIMES
A grandson of a Viennese woman who died in the Holocaust contends that a Gustav Klimt painting in the private collection of Leonard A. Lauder, the New York cosmetics magnate, was looted during World War II, and is seeking restitution.
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Art on display
• NATIONAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS - Av. del Libertador 1473. Tel. 4803-8814, 4803-8817 Permanent Collection (paintings & sculptures). European art, 12th-20th centuries. (ground floor). Argentine art of the 19th-20th centuries - permanent collection (first floor) -Spanish Art from the collection of the Museum- Precolumbian art - Maria Helguera, sculptures...
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Andrei Vavilov — energy magnate and nascent hedge fund manager — says he’s in the right spot if Russia invests oil money
From Russia with cash: seeding a hedge fund
By Ron Stodghill
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Andrei Vavilov — Russian multimillionaire, well-connected energy magnate and nascent hedge fund manager — smiles broadly in a Manhattan restaurant as a lawyer, a lobbyist, an economist and a former congressman praise him over shots of vodka and a lavish spread of lamb, salmon and beef tenderloin.
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Saif al-Islam el-Gadhafi, the powerful, 33-year-old son of Libya's extroverted and impulsive president, Col. Moammar Gadhafi is, in short, the un-Gadhafi
A son radiates his own light in father’s Libya
By Shaila Dewan
THE NEW YORK TIMES
CYRENE, Libya
The thin man with a shaved head smiled slightly as he made his way to a podium erected amid Greek ruins, a serious presence in a boisterous crowd that gathered last week to celebrate plans for an eco-development region near this town in the deserts of eastern Libya.
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Planet Hollywood has stood as a cautionary tale about the perils of celebrity and hype, as the company filed for bankruptcy protection not once but twice
Savour those curly fries: Planet Hollywood is back (again)
By Richard Siklos
THE NEW YORK TIMES
The celebrity investors were all smiles for the groundbreaking of the Planet Hollywood casino in Las Vegas — Sly, Bruce, Demi and Arnold among them. "It was a lot of pomp and circumstance," Sylvester Stallone recalled. "I think there was a gold shovel."
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New York City — home to the United Nations — often finds itself in the curious position of being grudgingly hospitable to some of the world's most controversial heads of state
Firebrands get grudging welcome in city
By Manny Fernandez
THE NEW YORK TIMES
NEW YORK
Fidel Castro, visiting New York City in 1960, complained about the treatment he was getting at a Manhattan hotel and stormed out. Its management later put up for auction the chicken feathers they said he left behind in Room 806.
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The Indian cricket team’s victory over Pakistan on Monday in a new lean, swift version of the elegant old game came to signify something far larger than itself
If it’s hip, fast and furious, is it cricket?
By Somini Sengupta
THE NEW YORK TIMES
NEW DELHI
Cricket, always more allegory than sport in this country, is very often the screen on which India's anxieties and aspirations are projected. That is why the Indian cricket team's victory over Pakistan on Monday in a new lean, swift version of the elegant old game came to signify something far larger than itself.
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Anniversary
By Guido Minerbi
FOR THE HERALD
9/11 brought back memories of the massacre at the WTC in Manhattan.
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For the first time in many European countries, nonprescription drugs are being sold over the counter at outlets other than pharmacies
Prying open European pharmacies
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
THE NEW YORK TIMES
MILAN, Italy
It does not look like a scene of revolution in one tiny corner of a vast Carrefour hypermart here: a couple of perplexed customers scanning five open shelves stacked with aspirin, ibuprofen, antiseptic cream and cough medicine.
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Preserving the artifacts (and rocks from the Moon)
Among the relics of the American space program, a few have achieved iconic status — John Glenn's Mercury capsule, the Apollo 11 command module, rocks from the Moon.
Then there is the Airstream trailer rediscovered last spring at a fish farm in Alabama.
The surplus trailer had most recently been...
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Platter chatter
With elegance, taste and a touch of history too
By Dereck Foster
for the Herald
Nobody can deny that one of the most attractive, historic and best preserved corners of Argentine history to be found on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, is the historic center of San Isidro. Small in extent but packed with architectural as well as the essence of bygone events, it is dominated by its elegant cathedral, inaugurated in 1905 and built on the site where, at the start of the 18th century a small chapel dedicated to San Isidro Labrador had stood.
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Kia's corner
United we eat
By Fereydoun Kia
FOR THE HERALD
Presently, the international news media are full of reports from the ongoing United Nations General Assembly in New York. We see and hear about world leaders gathering, holding speeches and meeting behind the scene.
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The space age launched more than satellites and spaceships, it launched a trend that changed pop culture forever
Some sights, sounds and scenes endured — others?
By Randy Kennedy
THE NEW YORK TIMES
It was not the most eloquent line uttered in movie history, and it may have been one of the silliest: "Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives."
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OFF TOPIC
A generous gift
By Kevin Carrel Footer
For the Herald
I am the recipient of the generous gift. I think of all the music, words and images that come to me, reside in me, flow through me and I know that I am fortunate.
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Lawsuits are being filed in the United States on behalf of borrowers who legal advocates say were sold homes beyond their means
An American dream goes sour in the fine print
By Vikas Bajaj
THE NEW YORK TIMES
SAN JOSE, Calif.
The Torralba family's taste of the American dream began to sour in May 2006, two months after they had bought a modest home at the southern end of Silicon Valley, when they received notice from a man who claimed that they owed him money.
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Kia's corner
United we eat
By Fereydoun Kia
FOR THE HERALD
Presently, the international news media are full of reports from the ongoing United Nations General Assembly in New York. We see and hear about world leaders gathering, holding speeches and meeting behind the scene.
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