Mukhabarat The Jordanian security service- the mukhabarat- is an efficient organization. It has to be. When you serve a small country in a tough neighborhood, safety can only be assured by using every means necessary. Some say that the Service has become a law responsible only to itself, so powerful that the Chief actually lights […]

Keeping Track I got a note from a mother who lost her son. Neat lady. She suffers her loss in quiet dignity. She told me once that she wanted to have her son near her, so she could visit. But her son, a pal of mine, had said he wanted to be in Arlington , […]

PFIAB God, it is Saturday and the quarterly publication is lying all over my floor, pictures not associated with articles, the print cartridge is out of ink, and my heart is starting to race. How am I going to get this done? The weekend is shot already. The floor guy is coming, Michigan is on […]

Veterans I slept in on this day, originally dedicated to the dead of the World War. There was no number before those words then, and of course some tinkering needed to be made to make it fit the greater horror that began again sixteen years later in China, and twenty-one in Europe. So Armistice Day […]

The Wasatch Front The wind rose overnight, cold and blowing hard from the northwest. The leaves are rising in the gust, raking their dried points across the windows and doors. Fifty days to the bottom of the year, but the darkness is pervasive and the chill tells me that I must find where I placed my […]

Election Day It is the day of decision here, the dramatic show-down between two white men in the middle 40’s who will take the state either screeching to the right, or catapulting to the left. Actually, they will do neither. There are only two elections with national implications happening in the country today. There is […]

Indian Summer It is time to start thinking about the holidays, although it is hard with the leaves still on the trees and the temperatures unseasonably warm. It is an amazing Indian Summer, the Fall stretching out by more than a month from what it is supposed to. Everyone commented on it at the Admiral’s […]

Big John They went at it again last night, the young men versus the authorities. Ten nights they have come out of the housing blocks with the darkness and begun to burn automobiles and structures. Now the nightly rampage has spread from Normandy to  Marseilles . Nearly a thousand cars were torched last night, if […]

All that Glitters Friday was huge . Everyone was dressing up in their glittering finery. It is the end of Ramadan, of course, so there are more than a billion people letting off some steam. By the time I was figuring out which sober dark suit to wear to the big ceremony, the insurgent attacks […]

Little Italy The immigrants are rioting for the eighth day in Paris . They are burning cars, and causing disorder in some twenty jurisdictions around the vibrant heart of France . They are reported even to be shooting at the police, who have been instructed to be quite stern with them. Rioting is nothing new […]