"A Christian woman accused of distributing the Bible, a book banned in communist North Korea, was publicly executed last month for the crime, South Korean activists said Friday. The 33-year-old mother of three, Ri Hyon Ok, also was accused of spying for South Korea and the United States, and of organizing dissidents, a rights group said in Seoul, citing documents obtained from the North. The Investigative Commission on Crime Against Humanity report included a copy of Ri's government-issued photo ID and said he..."

"In March 1981, two Milanese prosecutors were investigating a fake kidnapping incident from 1979, in which an international banker disappeared. The Sicilian-born Michele Sindona was a financial adviser to the Vatican and thought to have links to the Mafia. The prosecutors made an interesting discovery: While on the run from the authorities and hiding in Palermo, Sindona suddenly traveled to Arezzo, a town 600 miles north, where he met with the textile manufacturer Licio Gelli. If a personality like Sindona leaves..."

"The main purpose of British generals, it sometimes seems, is to say aloud the things that American generals (and British diplomats) think privately but dare not say in public. Things like: "We're not going to win this war." That was what Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, the senior British commander in Afghanistan, said last week at the end of his six-month tour in command of 16 Air Assault Brigade. His force saw a great deal of combat and lost 32 killed, but it didn't lose any battles. Regular troops rarely lose b..."

"For the past few months an incongruous figure has passed through the airports of the Middle East and Europe: a senior Afghan cleric who defected from the Taliban. Bearded and in traditional dress, he has unsurprisingly needed the help of the Saudi Arabian and British intelligence services - among others - to pass unhindered between capitals. He has always travelled in great secrecy, his movements known only to a few individuals at the highest levels of the Afghan government, in Riyadh and among certain Western a..."

"Abortion. Same-sex marriage. Stem-cell research. U.S. legislators backed by the Christian right vote against these issues with near-perfect consistency. That probably doesn't surprise you, but this might: Those same legislators are equally united and unswerving in their opposition to environmental protection...."

"Debt is not the only measure of wealth in a nation. Morals, agendas, goals, aspirations, and attitudes are also a means to gage the mental and physical standards in any country. America is broke; bankrupt on almost every level. We are culturally lacking, spiritually missing, educationally deprived and economically in deep debt. Our trade deficit and debt to China, the World Bank, and Japan are only symptoms of a wider and more pervasive bankruptcy...."

"The defining dramatic moment in the film The Matrix occurs just after Morpheus invites Neo to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill promises “the truth, nothing more.” Neo takes the red pill and awakes to reality – something utterly different from anything Neo, or the audience, could have expected. What Neo had assumed to be reality turned out to be only a collective illusion, fabricated by the Matrix and fed to a population that is asleep, cocooned in grotesque embryonic pods. In Plato’s famous p..."