Palin taken aback by Obama 'superpower' remark America is a military superpower "whether we like it or not,"  Read Article   

 Crackdown target in Iran: petsA powerful cleric issues a fatwa, later passed into law, banning ads about pets or alluding to their buying, selling or keeping. He has accused dog owners of "blindly imitating the West." Read Article

  COMMENTARY / The Boston Globe

For blacks, Jackson’s struggles mirrored their own  Michael Jackson, pictured in 1979 (left), underwent a series of plastic surgeries.   By Wesley Morris Globe Staff / June 28, 2009    The strange story of Michael Jackson is especially strange for his loyal black fans, who watched with pride as he became the biggest entertainer of the last quarter-century.  Related Content For blacks, looking at Jackson meant looking at selves Family orders private autopsy on Jackson’s body Blog Some thoughts on the passing of Jackson Photos The world mourns | Jackson through the years Jackson TV coverage VIDEOS Jackson's music videos | Jackson's #1 hits More about Michael Jackson
Yet loving Michael Jackson - his artistic genius and the many trails he blazed - has often meant looking the other way when it came to his appearance. Over the years, his face became increasingly unrecognizable, amusing and perplexing his fans while becoming the living embodiment of the identity crises many black Americans have struggled with for almost 400 years. Like “The Cosby Show,’’ which debuted around the reign of Jackson’s “Thriller,’’ he made race seem revolutionarily inconsequential without rendering it irrelevant, in much the same way Barack Obama would do decades later.Jackson moonwalked through doors opened by Jackie Robinson, Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Martin Luther King Jr., Sidney Poitier, and Muhammad Ali, and he is usually mentioned alongside Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, and the Beatles. He was a crossover genius.Like everybody else, black Americans sprint to the dance floor when a DJ plays “Don’t Stop Til You Get Enough’’ at a wedding, or turn the supermarket into “Soul Train’’ every time we hear it at Shaws. But at the same time, we identified with him because we understood his sadness.The question he forced is this: How beautiful is black? To turn your back on Michael Jackson was in some powerful, if barely conscious way, to turn your back on your own struggles with blackness.At several beauty salons and barbershops around the city yesterday, where Jackson’s death Thursday remained on everyone’s mind, the sentiment seemed to be that Jackson lived at the poles of black pride and insecurity.“We always get compliments for aging well,’’ said Andrea Sealey, a stylist at Salon Mone’t on Newbury Street. “Personally, I think he battled with that. I think his insecurities were like a lot of black people’s insecurities. He had the money to do something about it. Most, people, if they did have the money, probably wouldn’t go that far. But that I think is what made him sad and human.’’In 1993, Jackson told Oprah Winfrey - and, by extension, the entire planet - that he struggled with a skin condition called vitiligo that drained the pigment out of this skin. Regardless of whether this was actually the case, his face itself told the story…

  Robert Fisk: For the truth, look to Tehran and Damascus – not Tripoli


Forget all the nonsense spouted by our beloved Foreign Secretary. He's all too happy to express his outrage. The welcome given to Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi in Tripoli was a perfect deviation from what the British Government is trying to avoid. It's called the truth, not that Mr Miliband would know much about it. It was Megrahi's decision – not that of his lawyers – to abandon the appeal that might have told us the truth about Lockerbie. The British would far rather he return to the land of the man who wrote The Green Book on the future of the world (the author, a certain Col Muammar Gaddafi, also wrote Escape to Hell and Other Stories) than withstand the typhoon of information that an appeal would have revealed. Brown and Gaddafi. Maybe they should set up as a legal company once their time is up. Brown and Gaddafi, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths. Not that the oaths would be truthful. Related articles Lockerbie: now it's payback time Foreign office denies 'trade deal' to free bomber Gadhafi welcomes home Lockerbie bomber Gaddafi junior comes out of the shadows to take the credit Leading article: Lockerbie will not be laid to rest by this release Richard Ingrams’s Week: He may be obsessive, but this man won't be lied to
Megrahi's lawyers had delved deeply into his case – which rested on the word of a Maltese tailor who had already seen a picture of Megrahi (unrevealed to us at the time) so he could identify him in court – and uncovered some remarkable evidence from the German police. Given the viciousness of their Third Reich predecessors, I've never had a lot of time for German cops, but on this occasion they went a long way towards establishing that a Lebanese who had been killed in the Lockerbie bombing was steered to Frankfurt airport by known Lebanese militants and the bag that contained the bomb was actually put on to the baggage carousel for checking in by this passenger's Lebanese handler, who had taken him to the airport, and had looked after him in Germany before the flight. I have read all the interviews which the German police conducted with their suspects. They are devastating. There clearly was a Lebanese connection. And there probably was a Palestinian connection. How can I forget a press conference in Beirut held by the head of the pro-Syrian "Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine" (they were known, then, as the "Lockerbie boys") in which their leader, Ahmed Jibril, suddenly blurted out: "I'm not responsible for the Lockerbie bombing. They are trying to get me with a kangaroo court."Yet there was no court at the time. Only journalists – with MI6 and the CIA contacts – had pointed the finger…

  The “Black Art” of Antenna Design It's no big surprise to designers that Apple is having antenna reception issues with its new iPhone 4. That's because the phone's design is unusual. Read Article