President -elect Donald Trump announced his first top-level appointments on November 12, three days after routing Hillary Clinton in the U.S. presidential election. He chose Reince Priebus, the head of the Republican National Committee, as his chief of staff, and Stephen Bannon, his campaign manager, as his senior counsellor and chief strategist. Bannon’s appointment was […]
Several days before the bombastic and unpredictable Donald Trump was elected the 45th president of the United States, soundly defeating the overly confident front-runner Hillary Clinton, I had a sinking feeling he would beat the odds and prevail. Trump, a real estate mogul and a former reality TV show host, is manifestly one of the […]
It was historically and morally necessary to publish a critical, annotated version of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle), a prominent German historian said recently. The two-volume edition was published by the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich last January with a print run of 4,000 copies and was immediately snapped up by buyers in […]
Terrorism is the scourge of our times. We live in a dangerous and uncertain epoch, when jihadists rake restaurants with gunfire, suicide bombers detonate explosive vests and terrorists plant bombs aboard airplanes. Since the horrific events of September 11, 2001, when 19 Arabs commandeered three American commercial airliners and ruthlessly crashed them into the World Trade […]
Politicians tend to be very mindful and careful in public settings. Being on their best behavior, they strive for political correctness, avoiding comments or gestures that might be deemed offensive or inappropriate. Germany’s vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, a Social Democrat, dispensed with these weighty calculations during a recent election campaign event in Lower Saxony as about […]
Islamic State, the jihadist organization which has cut a swath of death and destruction across the Middle East and Europe, fully exploits social media to recruit new recruits. Thousands of Muslims and Muslim converts from around the world have been brainwashed by its postings on the Internet. Having been seduced by its radical Islamic message, they’ve […]
Ever since the ancient Olympic Games were revived in 1896 by Baron Pierre de Coubertin of France, they’ve been organized around the exemplary principles of mutual understanding, tolerance, friendship and fair play. As 11,000 athletes from around the world converged on Rio de Janeiro for this summer’s games, I gamely hoped that these hallowed principles […]