Forums: Culture By Region

Did you know that “bin Laden” is the vice president of the United States, or that the Civil War led to America’s independence? How about that Canada’s a state? Well, that’s what some local students at (what appears to be) a Washington state high school think. In a video that’s probably a few hours from going viral, a young man decided to question classmates for a video called “Lunch Scholars.” It is anything but scholarly.

It has been 40 years since the "The Godfather" drew fans into the iconic saga of the Corleone family, reinventing the mob-movie genre and embedding the phrase "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse" in the American idiom. But the blockbuster film and its two sequels, with more than $1 billion in revenues, are about far more than crime and punishment to Tom Santopietro, the author of "The Godfather Effect." Mr. Santopietro, a theater manager who has written books on Frank Sinatra, Doris Day and Barbra Streisand, saw "The Godfather: Part II" (1974) as a college sophomore, and it...

“You look like you need to learn to shoot,” a helpful receptionist advised Amanda Fortini as she sat waiting to see her doctor. Evidently her discomfort and worry showed. “What the hell? What did she see? Perhaps, I thought, she was referring to the fact that I’m not physically prepossessing—delicately built, with bird-bone wrists and arms. Or maybe she’d fixated on my all-black, un-Montana wardrobe and determined I needed some toughening up. I must have been emitting pheromones of unease, I concluded, the way some people signal fear to dogs. I didn’t want to be perceived as a human orchid....

LAREDO — A former hit man for the Zetas cartel calmly related to jurors his role in killings on both sides of the border, testifying Monday in the drug conspiracy trial of a man prosecutors say was also a hired killer. From the witness stand in U.S. District Judge Micaela Alvarez's courtroom here, Rosalio Reta pointed to Gerardo Castillo Chavez, 25, and identified him as a fellow Zeta. Pressing his fingertips together and speaking in a slow, soft voice, Reta, 22, told jurors that he had been in a team of hit men headed by Gabriel Cardona, an admitted Zeta...

Wisdom Cries out in the streets… (Proverbs 1)God’s wisdom is always crying out to every generation, whether it be through the scriptures, the church, or Israel, there is always a Divine witness to truth trying to get people’s attention as life pushes them on to their final destination. I believe that one of the ways God’s wisdom cries out to this generation, is in certain current events. It is true that for the most part the real message is lost on most people, due to the cacaphony of other incidents, or the urgency of the mundane. Many of these events...

No-child #2 turned 19 years old today. Noman remembers his birth vividly. No-family had moved the prior fall to Barcelona for Noman to take a faculty position at a Spanish University. It was explained that while Spain had socialized medicine, nobody who could avoid it used the public system. We promptly purchased private insurance and began seeing a highly recommended MD. No-wife's pregnancy was a preexisting condition. So, while pre-partem visits were covered, the delivery would not be. No problem, as our MD, like all doctors in Spain, worked in the public system during part of the day or week,...

NEW DELHI: The foreign ministry has asked its missions in central Asian nations such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as well as in Ukraine and Russia to re-examine visa applications of women between 15 and 40 years on the grounds of a spike in the number of sex workers from these regions reaching India. The advice has been issued just ahead of assembly elections and although there may be no connection, apart from larger volumes of unaccounted money sloshing around during the poll season, Indian officials have been asked to rigorously interview female visa applicants. The move is likely to kick...