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Peter Schiff is loud--a decibel or 12 above everybody else. And it's hard to get him to stop talking. Ask the man a simple question and you get a 10-minute harangue in response. This harangue is likely to feature libertarian political opinions that are by Schiff's own admission pretty extreme--inherited as they were from a father currently in prison (at age 81!) for refusing to pay income...
...third (!) and most ambitious novel about Dickens is Wanting, by the Australian - or if you like, Tasmanian - writer Richard Flanagan. Wanting begins when Dickens is mourning the death of his ninth child, Dora, and feeling increasingly alienated from his wife and from himself. "They say Christ was a good man," he cracks, "but did he ever live with a woman?" Flanagan's Dickens is a man who has only ever lived emotionally through his novels. Acting in Collins' play, which was called The Frozen Deep, he sets free feelings he was accustomed to keeping tightly confined, and his co-star...
What the stories of Franklin and Dickens have in common is the issue of wanting. Under what circumstances do men and women give in to forbidden desires - Dickens, a man starving for love, and Franklin, a man just plain starving? "We all have appetites and desires," Dickens says, "but only the savage agrees to sate them." The revelation that the stuffy Victorians had desires and acted on them isn't a particularly shocking one (nor would it have shocked an actual Victorian). But Flanagan makes the matter more interesting by posing it in the form of an insoluble dilemma: Which...
Guizhou province, in southwestern China, is a place of striking natural beauty: jagged peaks surrounded by fields of bright green rape, ridges slashed with limestone outcrops and plunging waterfalls. But these days the region's grandest sight is man-made: the Baling River Bridge. Due to be completed early next year, this 1.4-mile (2.25 km) marvel of engineering is a jarringly conspicuous splash of 21st century technology amid Guizhou's farms and rice fields, which haven't changed much in thousands of years. It's as if the Golden Gate Bridge had been dropped into some bucolic Middle-earth...
...delivered to the Air Force in 1994. By the end of the 1990s, the CIA was using it to track bin Laden. Capable of flying for up to 40 hours without refueling, the drone was a "brilliant intelligence tool," recalls Hank Crumpton, then the CIA's top covert-operations man in Afghanistan. Although the CIA was keen to weaponize the drone early on, the Air Force resisted the idea until 2000. Even then, firing the weapons was another matter. Crumpton remembers watching someone he is convinced was bin Laden on a video feed from a Predator in late...