The merger of America Online and Time Warner, announced in January and scheduled to close in the fall, is a monumental union by any reckoning. In dollar terms$165 billionit is among the largest corporate mergers ever. And to overstate its importance for the communications and entertainment industrie

When word leaked out that ABC television had commissioned the actor Leonardo DiCaprio to interview President Clinton for a special Earth Day broadcast, the network’s top news executives huffed and puffed and said that surely nobody at ABC news would be so stupidtheir word, not mineto enlist a

A good deal of the zing has gone out of the race for the presidency now that both John McCain and Bill Bradley have withdrawn. I didn’t realize the intellectual loss until last month, as I listened to Al Gore being interviewed by Jim Lehrer. Lehrer brought up the topic of abortion. Gore chose

Chicago Archdiocese Takes Part in No Sweatshop’ CampaignChicago’s cardinal said his archdiocese has joined a national anti-sweatshop campaign because the church is called in a jubilee year to proclaim liberty to captives,’ including those enslaved to undignified working conditions.

Art of TranslationBishop Trautman, in his article, Rome and ICEL (3/4), makes no mention of the widespread dissatisfaction expressed by so many with the quality of ICEL’s work, which is no doubt the reason underlying Rome’s intervention. I think the trouble is that ICEL, from the very ou

What do you do when you are the ex-president of a country that no longer exists with a majority of your countrymen bitterly blaming you for their own troubled situations ?

Though the title might lead one to dismiss this book as just another in the swarm of apocalyptic writings like those by Tim LaHaye Jerry Falwell and Grant R Jeffrey preying on public anxiety over the end of the world and predicting Armageddon and cosmic meltdown this work by a professor of polit

As if the social ills of Africa were not enough (ranging from military dictatorships, corruption, poverty, crime, unemployment, hunger, wars, ethnic strife, malaria and tuberculosis), H.I.V.-AIDS has become the latest deadly, silent killer, claiming an estimated 13.7 million people in sub-Saharan Af

A quarter of a century may be just a dot in a nation’s history or a mere blip in the history of the world, but for over one million Vietnamese immigrants who have made their home in the United States in the aftermath of the Communists’ victory over what was known as the Republic of Vietn