By Maryann Haggerty Special to The Washington Post We did laundry in Honolulu, Hong Kong and Madrid. Oh, and in a bathtub in Bali. This summer, my husband and I, both well past backpacker age, travelled around the world in 29 days. That’s an average of less than four days in each of the eight [...]

Strike a Light. They’ve Done it Again PLN, euphemistically known as the public power utility, blacked out Bali in spectacular fashion on Sept. 16. Island-wide blackness lasted only 25 minutes – they say – but many places were in the dark for up to five hours, including most of the bits of southern Bali where [...]

By Paulo Coelho For The Bali Times On a cold January morning, a man placed himself at the entrance of a subway station in Washington and began to play the violin. For 45 minutes passersby listened to six compositions of J.S. Bach. As it was rush hour – it is estimated that thousands of people [...]

By Doyle McManus On October 1, the United States and other great powers will restart talks with Iran, a new round in a long and so far fruitless effort to stop Tehran’s march toward nuclear weapons. This may be the most important diplomacy President Barack Obama has attempted – a test of his policy of [...]

By George Bisharat Will Israel’s decades-long impunity from international law finally come to an end? That is the question facing the international community in the aftermath of the just-released Goldstone report. Richard Goldstone, formerly a supreme court justice in South Africa and chief prosecutor in the international tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia, headed a four-person [...]

JAKARTA ~ More than 300 people were killed in road accidents across the country during the mass exodus to celebrate Idul Fitri, police said. “The latest number of road accidents nationwide is 893, in which 312 people were killed,” national police spokesman I Ketut Untung Yoga Ana said on Wednesday. “Most of those killed were [...]

JAKARTA ~ President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono will urge major world leaders to put tackling climate change at the centre of the G20 summit this week, a spokesman said. Yudhoyono left for the United States in the hope of pushing climate change to the centre of the agenda of the meeting in Pittsburgh ahead of global [...]

By Hannah Black For The Bali Times SILAKARANG ~ What a way to start a long weekend off work – with a 6.4-magnitude earthquake. Last Saturday morning I was lying on the bed playing with my daughter, Lola, when the rattling started, but it always takes a second or two to realize what’s actually going [...]

By Chris Erskine Los Angeles Times LOS ANGELES ~ The little boy with the Creamsicle hair is beginning the first grade. He’ll be in Room 15, the note from the teacher advises a few days in advance. “Please get a good night’s sleep the night before school starts and eat a healthy breakfast,” the letter [...]

Call me Ishmael. Call me captain. But don’t call me seasick. That’s more than I could say for most of the 80 people – including my wife, Sue – who recently went out on a boat to watch whales but instead, in a stunning display of mass disgorgement that even Herman Melville couldn’t have imagined, [...]

WASHINGTON ~ President Barack Obama sent a clear message to the world at the UN: he is looking for payback for his swift action in ending an era of swaggering US unilateralism. Obama’s debut speech to the UN General Assembly on Wednesday marked a pivot point in the new administration’s foreign policy and a search [...]

WASHINGTON ~ The top US and NATO com-mander in Afghanistan has warned President Barack Obama in a confidential report that the war against the Taliban could be lost within a year without more troops. In a blunt assessment of the eight-year conflict, obtained by The Washington Post and published Monday, General Stanley McChrystal said a [...]