Computer hackers, the bane of corporations and bloggers alike, are the heroes of Martin Himel’s documentary, Unit 8200, which will be broadcast by Vision TV in Canada on Monday, May 8 at 9 p.m. Two decades ago, hackers were regarded as common criminals, says Yossi Melman, an Israeli journalist who specializes in intelligence and strategic […]
Cuba usually comes to mind at this time of the year as the weather in Toronto goes from bad to worse. Holed up in my winter-bound house, I think of Cuba’s sunny weather, its sandy beaches, its turquoise waters and its tropical vegetation. Call it, if you wish, Cuba on the brain. But the lure […]
Eero Saarinen passed away five decades ago, but his architectural legacy remains firm and strong. “He figured out a way to be important across time, so even though he died young, he is still alive,” says his son, Eric, who takes us on a journey of his father’s works in Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who […]
With the launch of Operation Barbarossa, Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Holocaust entered a new and much more deadly phase. As the German army conquered vast swaths of territory, coming perilously close to capturing Moscow, mobile killing squads, known as Einsatzgruppen, were set loose to murder communist officials and […]
Ninety eight years ago, on an overcast day on November 11, 1918, the long nightmare of World War I ended with an armistice. Optimists claimed that World War I would be “the war to end all wars.” But in fact, the armistice, signed in a railway carriage in France by the Allied powers and Germany, would […]
The ultra-Orthodox Jews of Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood are an island onto themselves. Fanatically observant and utterly disdainful of Israeli secular society, they’re intensely insular and obsessively self-absorbed. To the vast majority of Israelis, these pre-modern Jews are virtually strangers. They may as well be Martians, but they’re Israelis. Shtisel, an Israeli television drama which […]
Adolf Hitler and his wife, Eva Braun, committed suicide in their Berlin bunker on April 30, 1945 as the Red Army advanced into the German capital. Hitler’s ignominious death was confirmed by German radio and by Marshall Georgy Zhukov, the commander of Soviet forces in Germany. Since then, the circumstances surrounding Hitler’s demise have […]
I read Gerald Durrell’s autobiographical novel, My Family and Other Animals, long ago, but its masterful portrayal of a British family on the Greek island of Corfu in the second half of the 1930s remained vividly fixed in a corner of my mind. So I was glad to learn that The Durrells in Corfu, a […]
It’s one of the most secretive and repressive societies on the face of the earth. Welcome to Saudi Arabia. The totalitarian nature of the Saudi regime is graphically exposed in Saudi Arabia Uncovered, a British documentary now available on the Netflix streaming network. The footage was shot by Saudi dissidents and British photographers with hidden […]
Deep in the vast Amazon rainforest are Indians living primitive lives in complete isolation. Totally untouched by modernity, they resemble our Stone Age ancestors. According to experts, several thousand such Indians belonging to a multitude of tribes have yet to make contact with the outside world. Once in a blue moon, explorers report sightings of […]