Roksana and Beauty lingered outside that fateful morning two years ago – neither wanted to go inside to start turning out jeans and shirts in the factories housed in Rana Plaza the day after they had been evacuated because of cracks in the building. But their line managers pushed and cajoled until both women went to their stations at two of the five ready-made garment businesses inside. “I was scared,” Beauty recalled in a video interview with Human Rights Watch in Dhaka. “I didn’t feel like going inside, my heart was pounding.” She said she couldn’t work properly that morning…

Jane Austen, one of England’s foremost novelists, was never publicly acknowledged as a writer during her lifetime.  She was born on December 16, 1775, at Steventon Rectory in Hampshire, the seventh child of a country clergyman and his wife, George and Cassandra Austen.  She was primarily educated at home, benefiting from her father’s extensive library and the schoolroom atmosphere created by Mr. Austen’s live-in pupils.  Her closest friend was her only sister, Cassandra, almost three years her senior. Though Austen lived a quiet life, she had unusual access to the greater world, primarily through her brothers.  Francis (Frank) and Charles,…

  While Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Washington offered an upbeat assessment this week of the air campaign in Yemen led by his nation, calling it “very, very successful,” civilians living under bombardment for more than three weeks expressed terror and despair in messages posted online         I prefer invite our honorable reader's to visit straight this link about the situation in Yemen after air campaign of dictatorship of Persian Gulf.   http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/18/world/middleeast/under-bombardment-in-yemen-civilians-voice-terror-and-despair-online.html?_r=0

I knew two of the men whose names are engraved on the Vietnam Veteran Memorial. The first, Artie Klippen, I saw a lot of that season in ‘63 when we both played Lacrosse at Georgetown. We had one of those anarchic undergraduate arrangements where we briefly shared a car, a beat-up old Chevy with the gear shift on the steering column. Compared to so many guys at that age who are callow and two-faced, Artie was a straight-up, warm and friendly guy, qualities that make him to continue to stand out in my memory, even though we never got to…

On April 30, in a ceremony at the National Press Club in Washington, the Nation Institute and the Fertel Foundation awarded their annual Ridenhour Prize for Truth-Telling to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and filmmaker Laura Poitras. The bestselling author and journalist James Bamford, one of the world’s foremost authorities on the US intelligence community, presented the award to Snowden and Poitras, who were present by live video link. Here are excerpts from their remarks. James Bamford: I’m very honored to be here to introduce two extraordinary people, Laura Poitras and Edward Snowden. Many years ago when my first book about the…