Foreign Affairs

The USA maintains that its aim is for a peaceful settlement in Nicaragua in a regional context that advances the prospects for democracy, protects the interests of the Contras and preserves US strategic interests. These goals involve a potentially long and difficult process. The accord concluded by the Central American Presidents in Aug 1987 by no means ensures peace. The practical question facing the USA is how to preserve its commitment to the Contras while still influencing the negotiating process.

The public, on both sides of the Atlantic, is engaged in debate on controversial questions relating to nuclear weapons: the desirability of a nuclear freeze; the deployment of Pershing II and cruise missiles to Western Europe; the production of the MX missile and the B-1 bomber; the development of the neutron bomb; and proposals to reduce the risk of nuclear war by such measures as the withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons from forward areas and the declaration of a strategy of "no launch on warning."

Since the founding of the People's Republic of China, Sino-U.S. relations have developed by twists and turns. Tying up with the changing postwar international situation, the development passed through different stages each covering roughly a decade.

A killing frost struck the United Kingdom in the middle of May 1944, stunting the plum trees and the berry crops. Stranger still was a persistent drought. Hotels posted admonitions above their bathtubs: “The Eighth Army crossed the desert on a pint a day. Three inches only, please.” British newspapers reported that even King George VI kept “quite clean with one bath a week in a tub filled only to a line which he had painted on it.” Gale winds from the north grounded most Allied bombers flying from East Anglia and the Midlands, although occasional fleets of Boeing Flying Fortresses could still be seen sweeping toward the continent, their contrails spreading like ostrich plumes.

Read More

The conflict between the men who make and the men who report the news is as old as time. News may be true, but it is not truth, and they never see it the same way. The first great event, or "Man in the News," was Adam, and the accounts of his creation have been the source of controversy ever since. In the old days, the reporters or couriers of bad news were often put to the gallows; now they are given the Pulitzer Prize, but the conflict goes on.

ALMOST half the Jews in the world find themselves today under the Nazi heel. It is impossible to determine the rate at which their physical destruction is proceeding. Nor is it possible to visualize the condition in which the Jewish masses of Poland, Rumania, occupied Russia and even Hungary will be found when the pall of darkness is finally lifted from Nazi-occupied Europe. Tragic as is the position of the Polish peasant, he is rooted in his native soil -- at least where he has not been dragged away from it and made to slave in an armament factory. The Jew in his Ghetto, on the other hand, finds himself despoiled of everything. Deprived of his meagre possessions, driven from his home, torn from his family, he has become the most abject of all the abject victims of the terror. In the reconstruction of a new and -- let us hope -- a better world, the reintegration of the Jew will thus...