I arrived in New York in 1976 intending to spend a few weeks investigating the role Washington had played in the downfall of the Australian government the previous year—and got waylaid for 37 years in America. A lot happened over those decades: I met a feisty New York labor activist named Cydney and we had […]

Read more

In January 2018, contractors working for the Department of Homeland Security will begin to fulfill what Donald Trump has promised: building “a big, beautiful wall” that will separate the United States of America from Los Estados Unidos de Mexico. The path of least resistance to breaking ground on the first segment of the controversial border […]

Read more

In February 2016, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) announced that, with the help of some European partners, it had partially busted a “massive” drug trafficking and money-laundering operation being conducted by “Lebanese Hezbollah’s External Security Organization Business Affairs Component (BAC).” Observers familiar with repeated U.S. attempts to stigmatize Hezbollah with the narco-terrorist label should […]

Read more

As far as relationships go, Russia was never going to be easy. “It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma,” Winston Churchill famously told a 1939 radio audience when describing what was then the Soviet Union; indeed, relations between Moscow and the West since the ascension of the Bolsheviks in 1917 had […]

Read more

Hitchhiking across Colombia in 2009, my friend Amelia and I received a particularly memorable ride from an upbeat truck driver who careened in carefree fashion along cliffside curves while we—perched one on top of the other on the metal fixture that served as the passenger seat—endeavored to remain upright and thereby maintain some semblance of […]

Read more