Rio de Janeiro is known as cidade marvailhosa in Portuguese. In English, this translates into marvellous city. The appellation is richly deserved. Rio exhausts superlatives. Famous for its frothy tropical exuberance and joie de vivre, Rio is crammed into several verdant valleys and defined by the Serra da Carioca, a steep green mountain range, and […]
Astonishingly enough, a plaque affixed to Canada’s newly-inaugurated National Holocaust Monument in Ottawa omitted an extremely important and crucial piece of information — namely that the victims of the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe were Jews. If your head is spinning in utter disbelief, so is mine. Tens of millions of non-Jewish civilians were killed during […]
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters whose headline stories on the burgeoning Watergate scandal forced Richard Nixon to become the first U.S. president to resign while still in office, obtained their explosive information from an anonymous source known as Deep Throat. For years, Deep Throat’s identity was shrouded in mystery, but in […]
Kurdish independence is long overdue, as U.S. Senator Charles Schumer (New York) declared the other day in hailing the outcome of the September 25th referendum on Kurdish independence in the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq. As he put it, “The historic vote in Iraqi Kurdistan should be recognized and respected by the world, and the Kurdish […]
David Friedman, the new U.S. ambassador to Israel, has been shooting off his mouth again, issuing statements at odds with American policy. An outspoken supporter of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, he recently claimed that “settlements are a part of Israel,” a loaded comment that surely embarrasses the United States. “I think that was […]
Israel has come a long way from the tenuous days when it was habitually short of weapons to defend its vulnerable borders. And while Israel is still dependent on the United States, its chief ally, for its supply of state-of-the-art fighter jets, transport planes and helicopters, the Israeli arms industry has grown tremendously in the […]
Yes, Valerie, you really screwed up. Big time. Your profuse apologies, masking stupidity, have been duly noted. What impelled you, a self-styled progressive and supporter of the Democratic Party, to retweet a despicable link that veered into the swamp of antisemitism? The writer whose link you foolishly retweeted accused American Jews of being a driving […]
Jerome David Salinger’s iconic novel about adolescent angst and alienation, The Catcher in the Rye, has sold 65 million copies in 30 countries since its publication in 1951. Acclaimed as a masterpiece of American literature, it catapulted its author to fame, a status he categorically rejected as he withdrew from the limelight. Having moved from […]
Six years in the making, Loving Vincent expands the boundaries of filmmaking. Shot as a live-action movie with actors and then hand-painted, frame by frame, by a team of 125 artists, this is an animated drama of uncommon vitality and creativity. Scheduled to open in Toronto on October 6, it’s a visually stunning and innovative production […]
The history and romance of aviation are evoked at two tourist-friendly facilities in Florida — Fantasy of Flight in Polk City and the Florida Air Museum in neighboring Lakeland. Fantasy of Flight, near Disney World in Orlando, possesses the world’ largest collection of vintage aircraft and enables visitors to experience biplane and hot air balloon […]