Arkiv-Global View

I DIDN’T expect to become a porn star. People rarely do. I was 19 years old, and my photographer roommate had an offer from a website to buy some nude pictures. We did a shoot and then waited two weeks in case I woke up in a panic over the idea of releasing naked photos of myself into the world. But I didn’t, and so I turned to the required paperwork. One of the boxes to fill in read “Stage Name (if applicable).”

Perhaps no one understood both the necessity and the costs of a free press better than Thomas Jefferson. In a 1787 letter to a friend, he wrote, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

No Pope had ever before dared to take the name Francis. And for good reason. St Francis of Assisi was the son of a rich merchant who in the 13th century cast aside his lavish lifestyle, giving away the fine clothes off his back. They called him Il Poverello – the little poor one. But this was more than an embrace of poverty. It was a challenge to what the man who was to become the first Pope Francis has called the "luxury, pride, vanity of the civil and ecclesiastical powers of the time".

Recent unrest in Bosnia has exposed the age-old dilemma about democracy once again: is democracy procedural or substantive? In other words, are procedures required by basic democratic standards, such as political equality, freedom of speech and free elections, sufficient for democracy? Does it matter what kind of outcomes result from democratic procedures? Is democracy a matter of a particular way of doing politics, or a matter of particular content of democratic decision-making?

I’m a man who’s always had lofty goals. And it’s my firm belief that you should constantly be envisioning a brighter future for yourself. But what separates me from the rest of the pack is that when I see something that I desire, I don’t hesitate for one second: I immediately lower my gaze and shoot for something much, much easier to achieve.

The fact is, when it comes right down to it, I’m a man who knows exactly what he wants and goes after something far more realistic.

Vladimir Putin has mocked diplomatic efforts to end the Ukraine crisis as Russia threatened to disrupt European gas supplies by cutting off sales to Kiev over its unpaid debts.

The Russian president said through his official spokesman that, despite deep disagreements with the West, he did not want a confrontation over Ukraine to spiral into a “new cold war”.

Signor ministro Alfano,
negli ultimi mesi noi del Giornale siamo stati molto critici nei suoi confronti. Spero però abbia compreso che nelle nostre parole, talvolta aspre, non ci fosse nulla di personale. In politica si giudicano gli atti politici e non gli uomini e le donne che ne sono protagonisti. Precisato ciò, desidero porle una domanda brutale: chi glielo ha fatto fare di lasciare la casa madre per andare all'avventura e alla ricerca di una improbabile gloria?

Russian troops pour over a border. An autocratic Russian leader blames the United States and unspecified “radicals and nationalists” for meddling. A puppet leader pledges fealty to Moscow.

It’s no wonder the crisis in Ukraine this week drew comparisons to Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 or that a chorus of pundits proclaimed the re-emergence of the Cold War.

But there’s at least one major difference between then and now: Moscow has a stock market.

A year after his death, outside the hilltop mausoleum that is the final resting place for late Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, the “eternal commander” was still putting on a show.

From giant speakers set up at the mausoleum entrance, visitors could hear Chávez riffing on love and crooning romantic ballads, karaoke-style, his voice carrying up the steep hillside into the modest cement-block homes above.

It was 1932, and, bizarrely, given his race and Lithuanian origins, Israel Sieff – already by that stage married into the Marks & Spencer business dynasty – had invited Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, to be a speaker at one of his Cleeve Lodge dinners.

A new political party such as his, Mosley opined, needed a “hate plank” and “the best hate plank around is the Jews”.