It used to be that journalists had a monopoly on blunt talk about U.S.-Russian relations. Since we are not diplomats, we don’t have to be diplomatic. Then missile defense flared this week as the burning issue between Washington and Moscow. On Monday, an open microphone in Seoul caught U.S. President Barack Obama asking Russia’s President […]

In early September 2002, one year after American troops entered Afghanistan, I reported newspaper stories from Kandahar, the main city of the Pashto-speaking southern part of Afghanistan. I drove in from Quetta, Pakistan, and stayed 10 days at the “best” hotel on Kandahar’s main street. For one report, I spent a morning walking the street […]

Just when politics here were starting to look boring again, along comes an outrageous girl band to rattle Russia. With their day glo balaclavas, bright tights and summer dresses on the white snow, the angry girls call themselves Pussy Riot. They’re starting to make President Vladimir Putin look like Dwight Eisenhower. He was the American […]

Vladimir Churov, head of Russia’s Central Elections Commission, has been busy in Moscow. The day after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s presidential electoral victory, the elections supervisor said that no other nation in the world could have “a more open, fair, transparent presidential campaign.” Previously, Churov, a former Putin aide in St. Petersburg, was best known […]