In the early days of the Cuban missile crisis, before the world knew that the cold war seemed to be sliding toward nuclear conflict, President John F. Kennedy telephoned his wife, Jacqueline, at their weekend house in Virginia. From his voice, she would say later, she could tell that something was wrong.
Why don't you come back to Washington? he asked, without explanation.
"From then on, it seemed there was no waking or sleeping," Mrs. Kennedy recalls in an oral history scheduled to be released Wednesday, 47 years after the interviews were conducted.
When she learned that the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba aimed at American cities, she begged her husband not to send her away.
"If anything happens, we're all going to stay right here with you," she says she told him in October 1962. "I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too - than live without you."
Society's Child
© AP/Khalil Hamra
Protesters gather as smoke of tear gas rises nearby during clashes with the Egyptian security forces next to a building housing the Israeli embassy in Cairo, Egypt, early Saturday, Sept. 10, 2011. Hundreds of Egyptian protesters, some swinging hammers and others using their bare hands, tore down parts of a graffiti-covered security wall outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo on Friday.
Protesters gather as smoke of tear gas rises nearby during clashes with the Egyptian security forces next to a building housing the Israeli embassy in Cairo, Egypt, early Saturday, Sept. 10, 2011. Hundreds of Egyptian protesters, some swinging hammers and others using their bare hands, tore down parts of a graffiti-covered security wall outside the Israeli embassy in Cairo on Friday.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials depicted a tense stretch of hours as they watched on security cameras and listened in on conference calls with six Israeli embassy guards caught in the facility as protesters rioted on the streets outside - and broke in.
In the end, Egyptian commandos made their way in and rescued the six after flurried phone calls between Israeli, American and Egyptian officials to try to resolve the unrest.
In a speech late Saturday, Netanyahu said one of the six, the embassy security chief named Yonatan, spoke by phone to an operations room in Jerusalem from their hiding place.
"The rioters had penetrated the building, penetrated the office, and only one door separated between the rioters and Yonatan and his friends," Netanyahu said. Yonatan told the officials in the operations room, "If something happens to me I ask you tell my parents face to face and not over the phone."
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Ahmed Zain, the channel's chief in Cairo, told AFP that police, officers from the culture ministry and representatives of Egypt's public broadcaster had also seized materials and that one technician was arrested.
He said they cited the lack of an official licence to broadcast and a complaint from the neighbourhood. He said a lawyer also presented a complaint accusing the channel of "sowing dissent" and "calling for demonstrations."
Zain said Al-Jazeera Egypt had on March 20 requested official authorisation, and that it had been assured it could continue broadcasting in the interim.
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Sixty per cent wanted Flower of Scotland
Sixty per cent wanted Flower of Scotland
The Angus Reid survey - conducted on September 1 and 2 - found just one in 10 north of the Border are in favor, preferring the 1967 Corries hit Flower of Scotland.
Support was even lower in the 18-34 age group.
Other suggestions showed a handful of people saying they would even prefer the likes of Donald Where's Yer Troosers.
Just 11 per cent opted for God Save The Queen, which in 1745 had an additional verse added to say "rebellious Scots to crush".
Sixty percent wanted Flower of Scotland, with support highest among women.
Hamish Husband, spokesman for the Association of Tartan Army Clubs, said Flower of Scotland was best suited for sporting events but added that it would be better to find a new anthem.
He said: "Flower of Scotland is a battle song and fits the bill when it comes to rugby and football. But it says nothing about our place in the world which is what a national anthem should do."
Twenty-four modern day slaves have been released from bondage after a pre-dawn police raid found them emaciated, hungry and living in ''filthy and cramped'' conditions at a British caravan park.
The men - Poles, Romanians and Russians as well as British - had been forced to survive in a ''state of virtual slavery'' at the Greenacre caravan park in Leighton Buzzard, north-east of London, according to police.
The men varied in age from about 20 to 50; all were vulnerable and had been recruited from homeless shelters and dole queues. Some are believed to have been in virtual captivity for up to 15 years. Five people - four men and a woman - were arrested in the raid on the mainly gypsy site at 5.30am on Sunday. The raid involved 200 officers.
The men - Poles, Romanians and Russians as well as British - had been forced to survive in a ''state of virtual slavery'' at the Greenacre caravan park in Leighton Buzzard, north-east of London, according to police.
The men varied in age from about 20 to 50; all were vulnerable and had been recruited from homeless shelters and dole queues. Some are believed to have been in virtual captivity for up to 15 years. Five people - four men and a woman - were arrested in the raid on the mainly gypsy site at 5.30am on Sunday. The raid involved 200 officers.
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Maxim Shevchenko: I will advocate for the Palestinian cause until justice comes to Palestine or until I die.
Maxim Shevchenko: I will advocate for the Palestinian cause until justice comes to Palestine or until I die.
Maxim Shevchenko is an immensely well-respected editor, journalist and presenter on television and radio in Russia. He is a staunch advocate of the Palestinian cause, a member of the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation and he is also one of the latest targets of the pro-Israel Lobby.
Hanan Chehata - You are an outspoken supporter of Palestine and have publicly criticised Israel for its human rights abuses against the Palestinian people. When did your support for Palestine begin and why?
Maxim Shevchenko - I began to support the Palestinian people as a Soviet teenager in 1982. There were a lot of wounded Palestinian fighters from Beirut in Moscow at the time. I casually happened to meet some of them. Talks with these people amazed me. They were the same age as me but they had been real fighters for freedom and justice.
At the same time I was studying at school. A lot of my schoolmates planned to go to live in Israel. They said a lot of bad things about Palestinians but they had never been to Palestine or had even met a Palestinian.
I could not understand why people that had such a bad attitude towards Palestine planned to live there while simultaneously Palestinians were forced to be exiles without a Motherland. I failed to understand why my schoolmates, who were born in Moscow, planned to live in Palestine. It seemed to me that that was a huge injustice.
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There were no radioactive leaks after the blast, caused by a fire near a furnace in a radioactive waste storage site, a French nuclear official said.
A security perimeter has been set up because of the risk of leakage.
The plant produces MOX fuel, which recycles plutonium from nuclear weapons, but does not include reactors.
"There is no 'I' in team, but there is in win," the basketball star Michael Jordan famously observed. But now it appears that such an emphasis on the role of the individual is a very male approach when it comes to competing. Indeed, a study suggests that women are much more willing than men to compete as part of a team.
Nearly two-thirds of the "gender competition gap" - the gap between the likelihood of men or women to enter a competition - disappears when people are offered the chance to compete in two-person teams rather than as individuals.Academics Andrew Healy and Jennifer Pate claim that their findings, published in the Economic Journal, have important implications for the design of competitive environments, such as elections and corporate career ladders.
Nearly two-thirds of the "gender competition gap" - the gap between the likelihood of men or women to enter a competition - disappears when people are offered the chance to compete in two-person teams rather than as individuals.Academics Andrew Healy and Jennifer Pate claim that their findings, published in the Economic Journal, have important implications for the design of competitive environments, such as elections and corporate career ladders.
© AP / Richard Drew
A person falls from the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center after terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the 110-story twin buildings on Sept. 11, 2001.
A person falls from the north tower of New York’s World Trade Center after terrorists crashed two hijacked airliners into the 110-story twin buildings on Sept. 11, 2001.
I arrived in Times Square around 9:30 on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. A large crowd was transfixed by the huge Jumbotron screens. Billows of smoke could be seen on the screens above us, pouring out of the two World Trade towers. Two planes, I was told by people in the crowd, had plowed into the towers. I walked quickly into the New York Times newsroom at 229 W. 43rd St., grabbed a handful of reporter's notebooks, slipped my NYPD press card, which would let me through police roadblocks, around my neck, and started down the West Side Highway to the World Trade Center. The highway was closed to traffic. I walked through knots of emergency workers, police and firemen. Fire trucks, emergency vehicles, ambulances, police cars and rescue trucks idled on the asphalt.
The south tower went down around 10 a.m. with a guttural roar. Huge rolling gray clouds of noxious smoke, dust, gas, pulverized concrete, gypsum and the grit of human remains enveloped lower Manhattan. The sun was obscured. The north tower collapsed about 30 minutes later. The dust hung like a shroud over Manhattan.
I headed toward the spot where the towers once stood, passing dazed, ashen and speechless groups of police officers and firefighters. I would pull out a notebook to ask questions and no sounds would come out of their mouths. They forlornly shook their heads and warded me away gently with their hands. By the time I arrived at Ground Zero it was a moonscape; whole floors of the towers had collapsed like an accordion. I pulled out pieces of paper from one floor, and a few feet below were papers from 30 floors away. Small bits of human bodies - a foot in a woman's shoe, a bit of a leg, part of a torso - lay scattered amid the wreckage.
This summer, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) scored a big victory, getting the Air Force to review all of its so-called "ethics" training. This decision by Air Force leadership was made after thirty-one Air Force officers decided to take a stand against what some officers had nicknamed the "Jesus Loves Nukes speech," part of the Air Force's missile launch officer training. These Air Force officers came to MRFF for help with getting this overtly Christian "ethics" training removed from the "Nuclear Ethics and Nuclear Warfare" class, a mandatory part of the first week of training for all officers in missile launch training at Vandenberg Air Force Base.
In late July, Truthout.org exposed the content of this training in an article titled "Air Force Cites New Testament, Ex-Nazi, to Train Officers on Ethics of Launching Nuclear Weapons." The Air Force immediately suspended the training.
