GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA — For anyone wishing to see what it would be like to live under communism, the Cuban border with America’s naval base at Guantanamo Bay offers a brief but decidedly memorable taste. Standing near Gitmo’s Northeast gate,…

On October 22, New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine presided over a much-publicized groundbreaking for the Stem Cell Institute of New Jersey, a state-of-the-art research laboratory that, according to the advanced billing, would attract a “world-class faculty” and “advance stem cell…

DJIBOUTI, Djibouti — If there were to be a contest for the world’s most beautiful topography, it would take a formidable challenge to knock Djibouti out of last place. From the air, the country calls to mind nothing so much…

For over two decades, Brigitte Mohnhaupt has been known as the most dangerous woman in Germany. The distinction is well deserved. A onetime commando in the Red Army Faction, the Marxist-Leninist guerrilla movement that terrorized democratic West Germany in the…

It was an unsentimental farewell that greeted Harriet Miers’ resignation last week as White House counsel. Conservatives, still sore over what they consider her undeserved nomination to the Supreme Court, were positively giddy at her departure. Likewise, the Left, which…

The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq Rory Stewart (Harcourt, 416 pages, $25) Few subjects have yielded so much unedifying literature in recent years as the Iraq war. Not the least trivial defect…

The most quoted line from Gunter Grass’s 2003 novel Crabwalk concerned the dark secrets embedded in Germany’s past. “History, or, to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet,” observes one of Grass’s…

Two surprises greeted the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas last week. First it triumphed over corruption-mired Fatah in the Palestinian elections. Next it unexpectedly secured the endorsement of a former American president. The president in question is, of course, Jimmy Carter….

Conventional wisdom has it that today’s Democratic Party lacks a serious foreign policy platform. For reasons not difficult to discern, Democrats have dismissed the charge as the caricature of mean-spirited Republicans and their media surrogates. But the evidence suggests that…

“It takes courage to die for a cause, but also to live for one.” So wrote Azar Nafisi in Reading Lolita in Tehran, her heartrending memoir of life in Islamist Iran. Unyieldingly modest, Steven Vincent would have questioned the pertinence…