Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:59:09 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Anne Applebaum :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/Anne+Applebaum istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/toward-a-fun-olympics/84624/ Tue, 26 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST "Closing ceremony of Beijing Olympics draws world attention, praise." That was how the Chinese press agency, Xinhua, described Sunday's final Olympic celebration, and for once they weren't exaggerating. Just before moving rapidly on to the next mass television event in Denver, American headline writers did indeed pause to heap attention and praise on China's Olympics. "As Games Close With Pageantry, U.S. and Chinese Teams Can Smile Over Successes," declared the Washington Post. These were... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/a-tombstone-for-china/84171/ Tue, 19 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Cymbals clashed; a giant scroll unfurled. There were fireworks, kites, ancient soldiers marching in formation, modern dancers bending their bodies into impossible shapes, astronauts, puppets, little children, multiple high-tech gizmos. The Olympic opening ceremony showed you China as China wants you to see it. But for a deeper understanding of how far China has come — and of how odd its transformation continues to be — switch off the Olympics and consider the existence of a new book, "Tombstone... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-sensation-of-solzhenitsyn/83194/ Tue, 5 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Although more than three decades have now passed since the winter of 1974, when unbound, hand-typed, samizdat manuscripts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's "The Gulag Archipelago" first began circulating around what used to be the Soviet Union, the emotions they stirred remain today. Usually, readers were given only 24 hours to finish the lengthy manuscript — the first-ever historical account of the Soviet concentration camp system — before it had to be passed on to the next person. That meant... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-hour-of-europe/82780/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST "This is the hour of Europe." Way back in 1992, when an otherwise forgettable foreign minister of Luxembourg infamously pronounced that sentence, it seemed to portend great things. "This is the hour of Europe." That meant that in the post-Cold War world, Europeans, not Americans, would resolve the conflicts that were about to become the Bosnian war, and maybe a lot of other things too. He was wrong. Those Balkan conflicts were eventually "resolved," up to a point, not by Europe but by America... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/unbelievable-saudi-textbooks/82328/ Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Because they are so clearly designed for the convenience of large testing companies, I had always assumed that multiple choice tests, the bane of any fourth-grader's existence, were a quintessentially American phenomenon. But apparently I was wrong. According to a report put out by the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom last week, it seems that the Saudi Arabians find them useful too. Here, for example, is a multiple-choice question which appears in a recent edition of a Saudi... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/brandenburg-gategate/81850/ Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST 'Odd." That's what the chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, said when told of Barack Obama's plan to deliver a major campaign speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, right where the Berlin wall used to be, where Ronald Reagan once famously called upon the Soviet Union to "tear this wall down," and not far from where John F. Kennedy once said "Ich bin ein Berliner" — "I am a Berliner" — to show his solidarity with the citizens of what used to be a divided city. One can see her point: We too... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/the-holy-grail-of-eurocrats/80126/ Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST Pretty much for as long as I've been paying attention to these things, Europe has been "in crisis" or "in chaos" or "in despair" because yet another European country failed to ratify yet another European treaty. Invariably, something cataclysmically important was at stake, such as the creation of a European currency. Often the difficult country was a small one — Denmark, say, whose voters rejected the treaty that helped create the European currency in 1992. At that time, France and Germany... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/will-foreigners-accept-obama/79640/ Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST "Will Americans vote for a black man?" I think I've been asked this question by foreigners of various origins a dozen times — or maybe three dozen times — since the American presidential campaign began for real last January. Now we have the answer: Yes, Americans will vote for a black man. Which means that it is now time to turn this rather offensive question around the other way: Will foreigners accept a black American president? I realize that this too may seem like a rather offensive... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/mugabes-food-fight-in-rome/79152/ Tue, 3 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST With an unerring sense of timing, President Mugabe of Zimbabwe arrived yesterday in Rome, thereby demonstrating the profound limitations of international diplomacy. Indeed, it's hard to think of any other single gesture which would so effectively show the ineffectiveness of international institutions in the conduct of both human rights and food aid policy. Even someone standing on top of the dome of St. Peter's, megaphone in hand, shouting, "The U.N. is useless! The E.U. is useless!" couldn't... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/burmese-logic/76348/ Tue, 13 May 2008 00:00:00 EST They are "cruel, power-hungry and dangerously irrational," in the words of one British journalist. They are "violent and irrational" according to a journalist in neighboring Thailand. Our own State Department leadership has condemned their "xenophobic, ever more irrational policies." On the evidence of the last few days alone, those are all perfectly accurate descriptions. But in one very narrow sense, the cruel, power-hungry, violent, and xenophobic generals who run Burma are not irrational at... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/medvedev-brings-uncertainty/75930/ Tue, 6 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Tomorrow, Dmitry Medvedev will be inaugurated as the president of Russia. There will be a ceremony, during which Mr. Medvedev will take an oath of office. Afterward, he will be driven home in a presidential motorcade, presumably to a presidential dacha. Yet despite these official appearances, no one knows whether Mr. Medvedev will then wield the powers of the Russian president. Will he be a figurehead? Will he take orders from his predecessor, Vladimir Putin? Or will he actually give orders... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/race-of-personalities-ken-livingstone-vs-boris/75509/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST First, a disclaimer: I have known Boris Johnson, Tory candidate for mayor of London, for some 15-odd years. During that time, I've also met his first wife, his second wife, and his mistress, though I don't think the latter merited that title at the time. I worked for some of the same editors as he did during his earlier journalism career, and can remember many of his columns. One — it concerned the dubious legal status of one of his children ("Congratulations, it's a Belgian") — still makes me... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/newest-olympic-sport/74707/ Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST In London, a man with a fire extinguisher hurled himself at a torchbearer using what a friend gleefully describes as a "rugby tackle." In Paris, the torch's omnipresent security guards — members of the Sacred Flame Protection Unit of the Chinese People's Armed Police, the same paramilitaries who put down riots in Tibet — had to extinguish the flame themselves, to prevent protestors from doing so first. In San Francisco, the torch disappeared, reappeared, changed routes, and then vanished... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/gaming-the-olympics/73592/ Tue, 25 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST "We believe the Olympic Games are not the place for demonstrations and we hope that all people attending the games recognize the importance of this." Thus spoke Samsung Electronics, one of 12 major corporate sponsors of the Olympics, when asked last week whether recent events in Tibet were causing it any concern. Coca-Cola, another Olympics sponsor, has stated that while it would be inappropriate "to comment on the political situation of individual nations," the company firmly believes "that... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/what-tibet-is-to-china/73104/ Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Cellphone photographs and videos from Tibet, blurry and amateur, are circulating on the Internet. Some show tear gas; others, burning buildings and shops; still others purple-robed monks, riot police, and confusion. Watching them, it is impossible not to remember the cellphone videos and photographs sent out from burning Rangoon only six months ago. Last year Burma, this year Tibet: Next year will YouTube feature shops burning in Xinjiang, home of China's Uighur minority? Or riot police... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/farcical-election/72276/ Tue, 4 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Wednesday, Dmitry Medvedev took a break from his job as deputy prime minister of Russia and held a public meeting. Dressed in shirtsleeves, he talked about pension reform, promised to improve education, shook a few hands. As public meetings go, it was an ordinary one — except for the fact that it was the first and last public meeting of Mr. Medvedev's presidential campaign. If you wanted to see the candidate before Sunday's vote, that was your one and only chance. Hillary Clinton and Barack... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/new-republic-is-born-unintended-consequences/71435/ Tue, 19 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST As not everybody now remembers, the wars of Yugoslavia actually began not in Bosnia, not in Croatia, but in Kosovo. The chain of events that led to the Srebrenica massacre and the bombing of Belgrade started there, in the late 1980s, when the late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic launched a series of repressive measures against this mostly Albanian, semi-independent, "autonomous province" of Serbia. These culminated in 1990, when Milosevic ended the semi-independence, revoked Kosovo's... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/archbishops-shariah-war/71121/ Tue, 12 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Is this a storm in a teacup, as the archbishop now claims? Was the "feeding frenzy," to use another Britishism, biased and unfair? Certainly it is true that, since last Thursday, when Rowan Williams — the Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the Church of England, symbolic leader of the international Anglican Church — called for "constructive accommodation" with some aspects of Shariah law, and declared the incorporation of Muslim religion law into the British legal system... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/falling-out-of-love-with-sarkozy/70793/ Wed, 6 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST Enfin, the rumors confirmed! Last weekend, President Sarkozy of France married his singer-supermodel sweetheart, Carla Bruni, in a 20-minute civil ceremony at the Elysees Palace, the French White House. A city official performed the service. The bridal party consisted of family members plus one or two fashionable friends. Apparently the bride wore white. Somehow, though, the first French presidential nuptials since 1931 were not an entirely joyous national event. Though a few people tried to... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/beauty-for-a-price/70626/ Fri, 1 Feb 2008 00:00:00 EST There was a particular historical moment, round about 1995 or so, when anyone entering a well-appointed drawing room, dining room, or restaurant in London was sure to encounter a beautiful Russian woman. Though the word "beautiful" doesn't really capture the phenomenon: The women I'm remembering were extraordinarily, unbelievably stunning. These women were half-Kazakh or half-Tatar with Mongolian ancestors and perfect skin, dressed in the most tasteful, most expensive clothes, shod in soft... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/tiny-car-tough-questions/69641/ Wed, 16 Jan 2008 00:00:00 EST If you haven't done so already, meet the Nano, possibly the most significant new car of the decade: Small, cute, and snub-nosed, it fits four people and a duffel bag, has a single windshield wiper, travels at 65 mph — and it's all yours for the princely sum of $2,500, roughly the same price as the DVD system in your neighbor's Lexus and about half the price of the cheapest cars on the market. Even better, at least for the philosophically minded, the Nano comes with its own moral conundrum: What... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/bitter-lesson/67429/ Tue, 4 Dec 2007 00:00:00 EST What do a British novel, a Dutch movie, a papal speech, and some Danish cartoons have in common with … a teddy bear? If that sounds like the beginning of an elaborate after-dinner-speech joke, it isn't. All of the above have at one time or another sparked serious confrontations between the Islamic world and the West, causing major riots, Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses"; attacks on churches, Pope Benedict's foray into Byzantine history; mass boycotts, Danish cartoon depictions of Mohammed... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/losing-the-other-russia/67011/ Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST In the photographs of his arrest, Garry Kasparov — former world chess champion, current Russian opposition leader — is wearing a nondescript grey jacket and a somewhat retro wool beret. He is gloveless. By contrast, the Russian militiamen doing the arresting are kitted out in full regalia: Tall fur hats with metal insignia in the center, camouflage coats, walkie-talkies, black leather gloves. Squint hard, and the pictures — taken at last weekend's "Other Russia" protest rally in Moscow — could... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/mission-unaccomplished/66419/ Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST The French Revolution had its Jacobins; the Russian Revolution erupted in Red Terror. The peaceful revolutions of more recent years weren't supposed to produce violent counterrevolutions. But now one of them has. Indeed, in a single week, the president of Georgia — Mikheil Saakashvili, or "Misha" to his friends — probably did more damage to American "democracy promotion" than a dozen Pervez Musharrafs ever could have done. After all, no one expected much in the way of democracy from Pakistan... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/chavez-and-his-idiots/65958/ Tue, 6 Nov 2007 00:00:00 EST Ninety years ago this week, a Bolshevik mob stormed the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, arrested the Provisional Government, and installed a "dictatorship of the proletariat" in its place. Though the Russian revolution is no longer widely celebrated (not even by the Russians, who instead commemorate the expulsion of the Poles from Moscow in 1610, I felt it important to mark the occasion. In honor of the anniversary, I re-read "Ten Days that Shook the World," the famed account of the revolution... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/disappear-first-ladies/65523/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST Admittedly, the divorce was one step too far. But right up until the French First Couple announced their permanent separation, I was rooting like mad for Cecilia Sarkozy. At last, a prominent wife of a prominent politician who did not pretend to be totally absorbed by her husband's career. During the few months she spent married to the French president, Madame Sarkozy did not entertain, did not campaign, did not give interviews, did not show up for lunch with President Bush, did not even live... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/seattle-on-the-baltic/64647/ Tue, 16 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST TALLINN — From outside, the offices of Skype don't look very different from the other Soviet and post-Soviet buildings which make up the nondescript suburbs of the Estonian capital. But inside, the aesthetic influence of northern California is undeniable. The high-tech, open-plan offices; the "playroom," complete with pool table and sauna; the young, bearded employees; the Dadaesque plastic crocodile hanging from the ceiling; the blue-jeaned spokesman who has been "too busy" to contemplate the... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/testing-freedom-in-holland/64185/ Tue, 9 Oct 2007 00:00:00 EST And now we come to what may be a truly fundamental test, maybe even a turning point, for that part of the world generally known as the West. The test is this: Are prominent, articulate critics of radical Islam, critics who happen to be citizens of European countries or America, entitled to the same free speech rights enjoyed by other citizens of European countries and the United States? Legally, of course they are. In practice, they can say what they want — and then they can be murdered for... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/mystery-politics/62954/ Wed, 19 Sep 2007 00:00:00 EST President Putin sacked his prime minister last week and replaced him with one Viktor Zubkov, an obscure official never before mentioned as a potential leader. Wondering why? Here are a few of the rumors in circulation: • Because Mr. Zubkov is completely unimportant, Mr. Putin intends to make him the next president of Russia, a possibility that Mr. Zubkov has not denied. After all, the presidential election is not until March 2008, leaving plenty of time for the Kremlin-controlled media to... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/what-presidents-dont-know/61022/ Wed, 22 Aug 2007 00:00:00 EST "You're not going to have time in January '09 to get ready for this job." "If the position of president was a street, someone would have to hold Obama's hand while he crossed it." Like John Kerry's flip-flops or John Edwards's haircuts, the foreign policy gaffes of Senator Obama have become a staple source of presidential campaign humor — so much so that the candidate himself has felt compelled to come up with counter-jokes. "To prepare for this debate I rode in the bumper cars at the state... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/trickle-down-lawlessness/59058/ Wed, 25 Jul 2007 00:00:00 EST My friend Nikita was looking drawn and tired the last time I saw him. He's a historian, but he doesn't have much time for archives these days. Instead, most of his energy is devoted to fighting the Moscow city authorities who want the residents of his state-owned apartment building to move out, presumably to sell the building to developers. He's willing to leave the apartment he's lived in for decades, but the law requires the authorities to find him a new apartment in the same part of central... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/post-post-9-11/56419/ Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:00:00 EST Late last week you could have been forgiven for thinking that the Star Wars era had begun. Space-age computer graphics dominated the news: Satellites orbited the globe, target sites throbbed on interactive maps of Europe and the Middle East. The talk was of Russia and Iran and of whether high-tech missile defense equipment might endanger human health. The pictures, in the wake of the G-8 summit, were of statesmen: President Bush's helicopter landing at a Polish beach resort, President Putin... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/riddle-that-is-blair/54546/ Wed, 16 May 2007 00:00:00 EST He has been called everything from an "inferior Bill Clinton" to "as divisive a figure as Thatcher." His record in the Middle East has been described as one of "catastrophic failure," and his mistakes have been attributed to "stupendous moral vanity." He has been called a success, a failure, lucky, unfortunate: "Blair: A Modern Tragedy" is the title of the Spectator magazine's special 36-page end-of-Blair supplement. Yet during the onslaught of political obituaries that have appeared in Britain... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/adieu-jacques-chirac/54087/ Wed, 9 May 2007 00:00:00 EST "All political careers end in failure," a British statesman once wisely said. Judging by the wreckage of the famous political career that ended this week, he was even wiser than he knew. With the election of a new president of France on Sunday, the lengthy professional life of Jacques Chirac —president of France for 12 years, mayor of Paris for 18 years, prime minister of France twice for a total of four years — comes to a grinding halt, apparently to the great relief of his compatriots. In the... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/new-kind-of-european/53647/ Wed, 2 May 2007 00:00:00 EST To anyone steeped in the thousand-year history of Anglo-French enmity — that bitter struggle over power, influence, and the edibility of snails — the highlight of France's presidential election campaign was surely the speech that the center-right candidate, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is now the very precarious front-runner, gave this year in London. Standing in the heart of London's financial district, Mr. Sarkozy heaped compliments upon his country's historic enemy. The British capital was, he said... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/agent-of-change/53071/ Tue, 24 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST It was October 1987, three weeks before the 70th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet elite had gathered in Moscow to mark the occasion. After the customarily lengthy speech by the Communist Party general secretary, Mikhail Gorbachev, the chairman asked whether anyone wanted to respond. Unexpectedly, Boris Yeltsin, then the Moscow party boss, went up to the rostrum. He spoke for a mere 10 minutes — and in that 10 minutes changed Russian history. Reading that speech now, it's hard... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/going-nuts-over-knut/52244/ Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:00:00 EST He is small, white, fluffy, and cuddly. Though only 4 months old, his face has already graced thousands of T-shirts, most major German newspapers and a good number of coffee mugs. This month he shares a glossy magazine cover with Leonardo DiCaprio. Haribo, the company that brought us Gummi Bears, plans to produce a raspberry-flavored candy in his honor. In case you have somehow escaped him on the evening news, and in Europe this is impossible, you can watch him on the Internet playing with his... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/happy-birthday-europe/51338/ Wed, 28 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST BERLIN — If you didn't notice that last Sunday was the 50th anniversary of the founding of the European Union, don't worry: Most Europeans didn't, either. The chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, who holds the rotating European presidency, did invite all 27 heads of state to hear Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," and it's true that at one designated Berlin nightclub, the Europeans of tomorrow danced to music played by DJs from all 27 countries. Fireworks went off as well, and of course a document was... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/tortured-credibility/50897/ Wed, 21 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST Back in 2003, when American forces first took custody of the notorious Al Qaeda mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, there was much speculation about what his capture might signify. Some thought he might possess information about other planned operations, some predicted his loss would fatally damage Al Qaeda, some guessed his arrest would lead to additional arrests. Others, among them Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, used his capture to float interesting theories about torture: when and... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/engineers-of-the-soul/50423/ Wed, 14 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST Florian Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck is an unlikely name for an Oscar winner. It is also an unlikely name for the man who, 16 years after German reunification, at last managed to get both halves of his country talking about the real experiences of those who lived in its now-defunct East. Mr. Donnersmarck (let's stick to the shortened version of his name) is a Wessi — a West German born in Cologne, in 1973. When he was working on "The Lives of Others" — recent winner of... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/old-becomes-new/49974/ Wed, 7 Mar 2007 00:00:00 EST Anyone who has ever had the good luck to work in old archives knows how surprising they can be. A thick and unappetizing file might, with patience, yield a wealth of interesting detail; a pile of yellowed papers can contain the solution to an old riddle. Recently, an amateur archivist stumbled across the letters of Otto Frank, Anne Frank's father, in a collection of documents that had been gathering dust in the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research for 30 years — proving that there was still more... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/good-place-for-democracy-aid/48593/ Wed, 14 Feb 2007 00:00:00 EST TUNIS — "If you wanted to support democracy in the Arab world, why did you begin with your enemies instead of your friends? Why Iraq and Iran? Why not us?" It's an excellent question, and when it was posed to me a few days ago by the president of the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights, Mokhtar Trifi, I at first found it hard to answer. Mr. Trifi, whose dark suit and elegant French make him seem like the statesman he ought to be, does indeed seem a far better candidate for American... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/let-them-grow-poppies/46798/ Wed, 17 Jan 2007 00:00:00 EST Once, the British Empire fought a war for the right to sell opium in China. In retrospect, history has judged that war destructive and wasteful, a shameless battle of colonizers against the colonized that in the end helped neither one. Now, NATO is fighting a war to eradicate opium from Afghanistan. Allegedly, the goals this time around are different. According to the British government, Afghanistan's illicit drug trade poses the "gravest threat to the long term security, development, and... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/reading-mein-kampf-in-tehran/45088/ Wed, 13 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST On Monday, the Iranian Foreign Ministry held an international conference. Nothing unusual in that: Foreign ministries hold conferences, mostly dull ones, all the time. But this one was different. For one, "Review of the Holocaust: Global Vision" dealt with history, not current politics. Instead of the usual suspects — deputy ministers and the like — the invitees seem to have included David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader; Georges Theil, a Frenchman who has called the Holocaust "an enormous... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/russias-killing-methods/44681/ Wed, 6 Dec 2006 00:00:00 EST In the 10 days that have passed since Alexander Litvinenko, an ex-KGB agent, died of radiation poisoning in London, we have learned a lot about his death — haven't we? Well, we have learned that Litvinenko died after somehow ingesting polonium-210, a relatively rare radioactive substance. We have learned that a mysterious Italian, Mario Scaramella — a self-employed "security expert" who last year claimed that he'd found ex-KGB men selling nuclear material in the postage-stamp republic of San... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/beyond-the-watershed/33319/ Wed, 24 May 2006 00:00:00 EST To be perfectly honest, I never really got used to it. However many times I had to say it, the words never sounded natural. "What does your husband do?" the nice woman in the carpool line or the pleasant man at the cocktail party would ask, and I'd try to toss it off lightly: "Well, actually, he's the defense minister of Poland." Then the nice woman or the pleasant man would look at me slightly cross-eyed, trying to guess whether I was serious. After they had worked out that I was indeed... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/what-is-the-value-of-working/32918/ Wed, 17 May 2006 00:00:00 EST WASHINGTON - Speaking as one who usually tries to stay out of these things, it is with extreme caution that I even dip my toe into the roiling waters of the current debate, if that is what it can be called, over motherhood, children and work. For years now I've ignored this national conversation, sitting out the agonizing over "why we are all overscheduled," ignoring the various books and polls purporting to show that housewives are happier, or that children in day care are more aggressive, or... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/breaking-the-logjam/32095/ Wed, 3 May 2006 00:00:00 EST WASHINGTON - Last week I got involved in one of those arguments that can happen only in Washington. It began innocently enough, with an attempt to ascertain whether the executive branch of the American government has the right to set fuel mileage standards - corporate average fuel economy standards, in Washington speak - for cars. While touring Biloxi, Miss., President Bush had declared that he would like Congress to "give me a capacity to raise CAFE standards." That implied, of course, that... ANNE APPLEBAUM http://www.nysun.com/opinion/meaning-of-duke/31855/ Fri, 28 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EST Just like everybody else, apparently, I've followed the twists and turns of the Duke lacrosse team scandal with rapt attention. The exotic dancer's charge that several team members raped and abused her; the subsequent discovery of time-stamped photographs allegedly showing she was abused before she arrived; the testimony of the security guard; the shifting claims of the other dancer; the mixed DNA evidence; the district attorney running for re-election; the criminal records of both the alleged... Anne Applebaum http://www.nysun.com/opinion/tilting-at-windmills-2006-04-19/31211/ Wed, 19 Apr 2006 00:00:00 EST "Look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants rise up, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes." - from "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes To my eye, they are lovely: Graceful, delicate, white against green grass and a blue sky. Last summer my children and I stopped specially to watch a group of them, wheels turning in the breeze. But to those who dislike them, the modern wind turbine is worse than...