The issue? Whether the president should greenlight plans for limited U.S. missile defenses. The White House has promised a decision by June, and pro-defenses GOP leaders in the Senate are determined to make him stick to this timetable. But even limited defenses would require revisions in the 1972 Antiballistic Missile Treaty, changes which Clinton insists must be negotiated with Moscow. Russia, however, has refused to play ball. And last week following the Senate vote against the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Moscow and Beijing raised the stakes, drawing up a U....

German reunification occurred, in all but name, at midnight on Sunday morning. That was the start of Tag X the “X-Day” on which East and West Germany merged their economies, exchanging the tattered currency of the East for the robust Deutsche marks of the West. In the political equivalent of a friendly buyout, East Germany plunged into the chilly but invigorating waters of capitalism. Economic integration is the point at which Germans begin to think and act as one nation....

For now, the ships are under surveillance by navy subs and reconnaissance planes. Intelligence officials say the Koreans are using decoy vessels to confuse the U.S. trackers and sneak the Scuds into Syria. The officials fear the shipment includes material for two secret underground plants Damascus is building to make its own Scuds. title: “A New Missile Crisis” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-10” author: “Phillip Stern” For now, the ships are under surveillance by navy subs and reconnaissance planes....

Geographical agreements kept the peace in the early years. But the business has grown more international, and in the 1990s Anheuser-Busch has tried buy its rival, or at least the trademark, from the Czech state. No sale. Anheuser-Busch still can’t sell its flagship brand in much of Europe, where Budvar’s Budweiser is a popular brew. But here’s a new twist. Nomura, the Japanese investment bank, may soon sell a big stake in its Czech beer holdings–which include a brewery in Ceske Budejovice that has won court battles to call its product a Budweiser beer at home and in Germany....

My father was a retired brigadier general, a World War II veteran of the Battle of the Bulge and the march on Bastogne, who maintained an unfaltering belief in the righteousness of the United States Army and any war it might choose to fight, including Vietnam. I spent the late ’60s and early ’70s marching in and organizing antiwar protests, including the Washington and New York moratorium marches in 1969, and formed a women’s collective to raise money for a bombed-out hospital in North Vietnam....

In 1983, Michel Foucault was immersed in the life of Saint Anthony, the early Christian desert hermit whose regimen of rigorous self-denial had so moved the youthful Augustine that he gave up his lusting ways and converted to Christianity. At the same time, Foucault, perhaps the most influential thinker of his era, was also luxuriating in the leather scene of San Francisco. Paradoxical? No, postmodernist. Through drugs and sadomasochistic eroticism, Foucault was concluding his Nietzschean quest for self-transcendence in a form that mimicked the saint’s equally tortured discipline of the flesh....

The well-intentioned but very-much-a-work-in-progress system has generated mixed reviews this season. Most in baseball agree with the basic idea — get as many calls right as possible — but the implementation of the challenge/replay process is a different story. Gone are the days when Earl Weaver or Billy Martin would come charging out of the dugout spewing profanities and venom that would make hardened criminals blush when they disagreed with a call....

The Legends Room store at the New York Yankees' spring training home does not have any of Rodriguez's No. 13 jerseys on sale as the team prepares for its exhibition opener next week. Eight players were represented with white, pinstriped jerseys hanging neatly on rods attached to a wall and available for $139.95 apiece Tuesday. They had the names and numbers of Babe Ruth (3), Mickey Mantle (7), Derek Jeter (2), Ichiro Suzuki (31), Brian McCann (34), Jacoby Ellsbury (22), Carlos Beltran (36) and Masahiro Tanaka (19)....

“Funny Games” is a postmodern variation on William Wyler’s once famous 1955 movie “The Desperate Hours,” in which a middle-class suburban family is held hostage and brutalized by a gang of escaped convicts led by Humphrey Bogart (Michael Cimino remade it in 1990 with Mickey Rourke). In Haneke’s excruciatingly intense new Hollywood version, Naomi Watts and TimRoth play a cultured, tasteful bourgeois couple who arrive at their lakeside vacation home with their adorable son (Devon Gearhart) and frisky golden retriever in tow—the latter an ill-fated canine dangerously named Lucky....

In the 10th, the A’s slipped another game behind the Angels in the exciting AL West race. Howie Kendrick drove in Albert Pujols with a sacrifice fly in the 10th, and Los Angeles opened a two-game lead atop the major league standings with a 4-3 victory Thursday night. Josh Hamilton had a 10th-inning single as the Angels (80-53) edged Oakland (78-55) to begin a four-game series between the California clubs with the majors’ two best records....

Pyongyang is different from what I anticipated. Recent accounts make it sound like a Potemkin city where every trace of poverty, hunger or infirmity has been carefully shipped off to the countryside. That’s not precisely true: the old and infirm are here, and plenty of human suffering is visible. Yet, even so, you don’t see quite as much of it in Pyongyang as you do in most other Asian cities....

Wearing a black pantsuit, a large gold cross and a tense, angry look on her face, Brown tearfully recounted alleged incidents that depicted her former brother-in-law as a bullying, violent man. After a night at a Mexican restaurant in the late 1980s, she said, she returned to O.J.’s house with Simpson, Nicole and a friend. Denise testified that she told Simpson that he took Nicole “for granted,” and a fight ensued....

But Wallace’s bad Japanese–he gets tutoring once a week–hardly matters these days. Nor does Scardino’s Texarkana drawl grate much on British ears. With surprising speed, the big multinationals–and many small ones–have come to speak the same language and inhabit a common culture. The corporate equivalent of McWorld has bred a new kind of executive–call him, or her, globoboss–who is breaking down cultural barriers. They are also helping to drive cross-border M&A to new levels: $250 billion so far this year....

This is obviously a fanciful ambition. Bin Laden operates more like a venture capitalist than the head of a conquering army. Think of him as the chairman of Jihad Inc., together with its subsidiary, Jihad.com. The question is how powerful this multinational force has become. In the occupied West Bank, in devastated Chechnya and embattled Kashmir, in parts of Indonesia and the Philippines, even in areas where Muslims make up large majorities, Islamist extremists are on the move and in contact with each other, however tenuously....

They shape how we understand issues and what we do about them. That’s why we saw heated debate across the aisle recently about whether care and human services should be considered infrastructure. It’s why calling low-wage workers “essential” was such a profound shift. And it’s why we’re hearing about labor shortages instead of inadequate wages. The language we use to talk about work often reinforces our status quo: a low-wage economy in which tens of millions of working Americans are barely making ends meet....

Amiable, schizoid and disposable, “Big Daddy” is just as formulaic as you might imagine: any story in which an irresponsible slob decides to adopt an orphan can be headed in only one uplifting direction. But there are enough rudely funny surprises along the way to hold your attention. Just because Sandler’s Sonny makes little sense as an actual human being doesn’t mean he won’t make you laugh. This improbable father figure is a big kid himself, living off insurance money from a car accident....

Cuomo is fighting for his political life while beset by serious charges of responsibility for several thousand deaths of senior citizens because of his coronavirus pandemic decisions, as well as accusations of sexual harassment by three former female staffers. Meanwhile, DeSantis’ much-criticized COVID response record is now looking good, by comparison, with that of Cuomo and other lockdown-happy Democratic governors. He’s also assumed a position as the Republican most likely to inherit the mantle of Donald Trump as his party’s 2024 standard-bearer, should the former president choose not to run again....