Two sites, one very large and one very small, dominate my memories of Bucharest in 1992. The very large one was the House of the Republic, a US$10-billion mammoth edifice constructed by dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who wanted his Palace and his Ministries of Truth, Love, and Peace all in one place. The small site was Ceausescu's grave.
Read MoreTRIPOLI - Afriqiyah Airways is better than its Web site suggests. Founded in 2001 as the airline of Africa (with a hub here, in the inconvenient-to-everywhere hermit state of Libya), it owns a fleet of Airbuses that still give off that nose-singeing, chemical-rich, new-plane smell. It is emphatically not Air Afrique, the West African carrier that went bust in 2002, that nearly shares Afriqiyah's name, and that became known for its eccentric service and proud defiance of its own timetables. Instead, the airline of Muammar al Qadhafi is sleek, attractive, and reliable. The seats -- green, the color of Libya's flag -- are clean, and have the usual movies, music, and games, all on an in-flight entertainment screen so jauntily functional that it looks almost as if they installed one of those MIT Hundred-Dollar-Laptops in the back of every seat.
Read MoreCAIRO -- After aerial bombing and rent control, I suppose one of the worst things that can happen to a city is acute mania for national sports. This week, Egypt went mad for soccer, as the Egyptian team played Algeria for the Arabs' only place in the 2010 World Cup. They beat Algeria in Cairo Saturday, scoring the decisive goal with seconds to go in stoppage time, then lost to Algeria in the tiebreaker game Wednesday night in Khartoum. I was present for the orgy of celebratory rioting and pyromania after the first match. This morning, after a citywide depressive episode following the loss in the second match, mobs have congregated around the Algerian embassy, and the thrown stones of the morning have the makings of a diplomatic incident by evening.
Read MoreLast week, Rob Nordland filed a great story about the Iraqi police's use of the ADE 651, a bomb-detecting device that costs "$16,500 to $60,000 each" (love that margin of error) and does not, strictly speaking, detect bombs. The people at the James Randi Educational Foundation, never ones to decline a bet on a sure thing, offered a million dollars to the manufacturer if it could prove the device worked better than chance. The manufacturer, based in London, has not taken up the challenge, and the overall impression of the sneering article is that the Iraqi security forces are being blown up, and allowing their countrymen to be blown up, because they are too scientifically illiterate to know they've been had.
Read MoreThe Iranian government fielded an impressive squad of angry, hungry, Jew-hating fanatics. What of the opposition? Their counterprotest, centered slightly north and east of the main event, has attracted ample coverage from many sources, who offered reports that to my eyes, on the fringes of the counterprotest, sound plausible and accurate. I did not see Muhammad Khatami shoved to the ground, or any of the other more dramatic scenes of thuggery. Around Haft-e Tir, the government did break out the batons and beat protesters at the fringes, but mostly they seemed to have learned the lesson that by isolating the protesters to a few small areas they could avoid the spectacle of outright violence.
Read MoreThis is a small point. I have mentioned the funny hats, the parade of uniforms, the howling masses seeking to be heard and then entertained. What kept the event from being even more like a carnival or state fair (think Shriners, Boy Scouts, crowds at a sideshow) was the total absence of food, let alone Cokes and funnel cakes. Quds Day fell, as it does every year, on the last Friday in Ramadan. Pervading this fiesta of Palestinian solidarity and anti-Semitism was hunger and thirst.
Read More(This is an account of the Quds Day rally in Tehran. Click here for all parts of the series.)
At a stand just off Enqelab, near the center of the Quds Day rally, a very active desk gave away and sold postcards and memorabilia about the Palestinian cause, and about the perfidy of the Israelis. For about $1.50 I bought Holocaust, a book of illustrations by the Iranian political cartoonist Maziar Bijani, whose work the organizers sold proudly. I reproduce a few key images below. Think of it as an anti-Maus.
Read MoreTraffic diminishes on Ferdowsi Street every Friday morning, and especially during Ramadan. But only on a strange and special Friday does it decline to almost nothing, as it did today. Normally it is one of those traffic-menaced central Tehran boulevards where drivers cut each other off for sport, and where pedestrians who missed the Iran-Iraq War can satisfy their urges for martyrdom. Today its car traffic was mostly blocked off, and all the pedestrians had already gone up to Enqelab Street, the main drag of the Quds Day parade.
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TEHRAN -- Slightly over a month ago, anti-government protesters (the ones not yet in prison, or murdered) went back to the streets of Tehran, in a counter-protest against a government-orchestrated parade. The protesters wore easily identifiable green, so they knew that if Basij militiamen wanted to bust their heads, their colors would mark clearly which heads to bust. And bust they did. Media and cell-phone cameras captured images of young revolutionaries thwacked in the street and bleeding, and stories of the violence ran all over the Web and in print. My colleagues Jeffrey Goldberg and Andrew Sullivan were especially thrilled, and read the day's events as signs of a movement bloodied but unbowed.
Read MorePALENQUE -- Last month, Mexico decriminalized possession and use of small amounts of pot, heroin, methamphetamine, and acid. You still can't buy or sell drugs, and if you have more than a very small amount you can still get in serious trouble. At Room for Debate, the New York Times has asked five luminaries to give opinions on this move. Some are insightful. I could weigh in with an opinion, too, but since this blog is a reported one, I instead procured a bag of psilocybin mushrooms and ate them in my hotel room, to experience a newly semi-legal Mexican high myself.
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