Daniel Garay
Since 1991, the democratically oriented public in Russia had advocated for the legal regulation of an alternative civil service as a substitute for military service by conscription. All such attempts met with active resistance by the military lobby. However, in the winter of 2002 the Russian government submitted an Alternative Service (ACS) bill to the Duma; drafted in the ministry of defence, the bill had a number of discriminatory provisions.
Alternative service is not necessarily…
In 1985, at the height of the Iran-Iraq war, all-round American patriot Colonel Oliver North met with Iranian businessmen in a hotel room in Frankfurt: “...one of the things that we would like to do, okay, is we would like to become actively engaged in ending this war in such a way that it becomes very evident to everybody that the real problem in preventing peace in the region is Saddam Hussein, and we'll have to take care of that...“
With this introduction, images…
Gore Vidal knows how to write. The only problem is that you get the feeling he's written it all before. Literally. Nowhere on the cover (front or back) are you warned that three-quarters of the book is a reprint of articles that appeared previously in Vanity Fair (three) or The Nation (one), which were published as long ago as 1997 (although I can't say the material feels dated, far from it).
The drawback of having read it all before won't apply to everyone of…
