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What Will Vietnam Think of Army Combat Photographer's New My Lai Revelation?
The story by Evelyn Theiss of The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer has been online since Friday and I can't stop wondering how Vietnam will react to it. The headline: "My Lai photographer Ron Haeberle admits he destroyed pictures of soldiers in the act of killing." The story also ran on the Ohio paper's front page. Unless I'm Googling wrong, America seems to have shrugged off or simply missed this brand-new footnote to 1968's slaughter of hundreds of … Read More
November 22, 2009 | In World
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The new Atlantic magazine has an intriguing dispatch about how "Iranians line up daily to cross the Astara River to buy and sell jeans, chickens, bras, laptops—and often sex and schnapps and heroin." Their destination -- the Azerbaijani town of Astara -- amounts to "the Tijuana of the Caspian," according to journalist Peter Savodnik, who wrote the piece. Read More
November 19, 2009 | In World
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Losing the North Korea Nuke Talks in Translation
Maybe everyone else already knows this, but I was stunned to learn that an utterly pedestrian detail -- the reliability of translation services -- has hurt America's efforts to negotiate an end to the turmoil over North Korea's nuclear weapons. According to a report released this month by the Center for a New American Security, "uncertainty over translations has often derailed negotiations and undermined potential agreements." Read More
November 16, 2009 | In World
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Pakistani Fashionistas Through the Lens of a War Photographer
My own presumptions about Pakistan did not prepare me for the sight of this, this, this, or any of Kate Brooks' other photos from Karachi's "fashion week" -- a glitzy event that, in the words of its organizer, can be seen as a "gesture of defiance to the Taliban." Read More
November 16, 2009 | In World
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What Does Growing Up in Gaza Mean for Peace?
Knowing full well that I tee myself up for easy, Whitney-Houston-themed ridicule, I'm here to say that the children are our future, and that childhood in the Gaza Strip -- a radicalized, blinkered, deprived existence, according to Lawrence Wright's humane report for The New Yorker -- bodes very badly for the f… Read More
November 9, 2009 | In World
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Guinea Teeters: "What Will the World Do?"
Because government troops in Guinea massacred civilian protesters at about the same time as I started blogging for Big Think, I've committed myself to using this space to track events in that all-too-easily-forgotten piece of west Africa. A November 5 BBC radio report warns th… Read More
November 9, 2009 | In World
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Hersh: Nuclear Mutiny in Pakistan?
One word haunts Seymour Hersh's new investigative piece about the potentially shaky security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal: "mutiny." As Hersh writes, "the Taliban overrunning Islamabad is not the only, or even the greatest, concern. The principal fear is mutiny—that extremists inside the Pakistani military might stage a coup, take control of some nuclear assets, or even divert a warhead." Read More
November 9, 2009 | In World
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The Junk-Shop Pragmatism of Asymmetric Warfare
Like any mere bystander, I'm always at risk of getting etherized by the abstractions of war. So there was something compelling and arresting about hearing writer Mark Danner detail the junk-shop pragmatism that goes into making a roadside bomb and waging so-called "asymmetric warfare." Read More
November 9, 2009 | In World
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Counterinsurgency (First in an Infinite List of Things I Might Be Wrong About)
Because we aspire to put ideas above ideology here at Big Think, I want to make sure you've heard of Andrew Bacevich, a scholar and retired army officer who would disagree mightily with my recent assertion that "America helps itself in warfare by relying on face-to-face counterinsurgency." Read More
November 2, 2009 | In World
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A Foreword to the Future in Afghanistan?
Why Vietnam Matters -- a book recommended recently by George Packer of The New Yorker -- gets interesting before you come across a single word written by the book's author. Richard Holbrooke, the president's special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, wrote a foreword for the book which might hold hints of the future. Read More
November 2, 2009 | In World
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Are Mormons America's Leading Export of Global Pedestrians?
When I muse about the sort of Americans who might one day write in to share first-hand insights on this Global Pedestrian blog of mine, I tend to think of Peace Corps volunteers or backpackers with Eurail passes or even members of the U.S. military. A group I didn't consider, until reading the latest New York Times Modern Love column, is Mormons. Read More
November 2, 2009 | In World
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"Needless Dams and Roads to Nowhere" in Japan
If you think "Sony" or "Toyota" when you think of Japan, you might just be as clueless as I've been about "the nation’s postwar order, which relied on colossal public works spending," according to the New York Times. Read More
November 2, 2009 | In World
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Afghanistan and the "Choreography" of Not Getting Laughed At
"Obama's War," the smart Frontline episode about Afghanistan and Pakistan, includes a disquieting exchange between a U.S. Marine and two tribal elders in a remote Afghan village. Since this Global Pedestrian blog aspires to be about revelatory moments such as these, I can't stop myself from sharing it here. Read More
October 26, 2009 | In World
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Rape, Shame, Outrage, and Sobbing in Guinea
Having blogged twice -- here and here -- about the September massacre by government forces in the west African nation of Guinea, I hope we're all keeping an eye on the story. Before I turn to a close-up view of the suffering, I want to note that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has brought increased global attention to reports of rapes committed during the crackdown. Read More
October 26, 2009 | In World
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Drug-war dispatches out of Mexico, Pakistan's seeming inability to control its tribal areas, and Jon Lee Anderson's recent reporting on the largely lawless swaths of Rio de Janeiro lodged a question in my mind: How many people in the world live in places where no government actually governs? Read More
October 26, 2009 | In World
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Pakistan, the C.I.A., and the "Hazards of Robotic Warfare"
I can't blog forthrightly about the remote-control assassinations detailed this week in The New Yorker without first alerting readers to my bias -- a bias that's more about pragmatism and temperament than about ideology or respect for U.S. law. Read More
October 23, 2009 | In World
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In India, the Life-Saving Results of "No loo? No 'I do.'"
Fittingly, it was my wife who pointed me to a great little story in the Washington Post about how some women in India are refusing to get married until the would-be groom secures a toilet for the couple's future home. The story seems charming but frivolous until you read that "665 million people in India -- about half the population -- lack access to latrines." Read More
October 20, 2009 | In World
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Has the U.S. Really Learned "Nothing" From the Soviet Union's Afghan Quagmire?
Maybe it’s because I’ve been so baffled by Afghanistan or because I’m allergic to the hyperbolic use of “never” and “always” and “nothing.” Whatever the cause, I cringed when I read this headline in a British newspaper over the weekend: “Same old mistakes in new Afghan war (Soviet military archives show latest international intervention in Afghanistan has learnt nothing from the war two decades ago).” Read More
October 20, 2009 | In World
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Africa: "When two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers."
When Nigeria handed over a disputed peninsula to Cameroon last year, it looked a lot like a happy ending -- a war averted and, in the words of the United Nations secretary general, "a model for negotiated settlements of border disputes." But as a recent BBC radio broadcast showed, even a "model" solution can leave displaced people feeling trampled. Read More
October 19, 2009 | In World
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I'm bursting with things I want to share here today. But we've got a new look and new blog names, so I want to start by explaining what to expect from a blog called Global Pedestrian. Read More
October 19, 2009 | In World
David Quigg is a writer and photographer. Before quitting newspaper journalism in 2003 to stay home with his newborn son and toddler daughter, David covered the World Trade Organization riots, politics, local government, and all things Seattle for The (Tacoma) News Tribune. In addition to Big Think, he now writes for The Huffington Post and his own blog, which he describes as "an undignified glimpse of the scattershot passions that, with any luck, will conspire to prevent me from ever serving as an expert panelist." He is the author of an unpublished novel, Void Where Prohibited.