As the Eurostar links improve, Paris is emerging as the hub of a new Europe, with high-speed international links to Germany, Italy and Spain. As such, the city is once again in the kind of central role in Europe that it has always assumed to be its destiny. At the same time, unlike the competing cities of Barcelona, Berlin or Milan, Paris has not been forced to reinvent itself since the Sixties. There is therefore none of the architectural daring that characterises the new Berlin or the truly globalised designer culture of Barcelona. Indeed, after long years of political and cultural stagnation, the big question is whether tired old Paris - once so proud of its status as the so-called the 'Capital of the 19th Century' - is even fit for purpose in the 21st century.

The problem is that Paris is still beautiful.

Islamic culture has contributed a number of ideas to western culture, including the development of domes in building construction.

The United States possesses neither the capacity nor the wisdom required to liberate the world's 1.4 billion Muslims, who just might entertain their own ideas about what genuine freedom entails. Islam will eventually accommodate itself to the modern world, but Muslims will have to work out the terms.

The world in which we find ourselves at the start of the new millenium is littered with the debris of utopian projects, which though they were framed in secular terms that denied the truth of religion were in fact vehicles for religious myths.

Deception is justified if it advances human progress -- and then it is not deception.

Decade after decade, one century layering upon the last, the physical identity of this urban axis straddling two continents is constantly being reconsidered, if only bit by bit, piece by piece. So a visitor curious to understand contemporary ideas and influences in Istanbul, to know how the storied city is falling and rising today, should focus on individual elements.

We replay memories as though they were our own home movies. And other people's movies, and other people's stories, become, by some circuitous route, our own. The events unfolding up on the screen may not have happened to us, but the movies did. And now movies are in us, and TV is in us, and our relationship to them is no longer simply as witnesses and viewers of once-novel media. They frame our dreams and, in part, our waking lives.

We can see that what some have criticized as a descent into eclecticism in fact reflects with great precision the great variety of the life that Picasso was living as he faced the unavoidable fact that he was becoming middle-aged.

There is something reassuring about a biographer who is untouched by the modern inclination to contextualize everything, to regard every move a man makes as somehow conditioned or shaped by his environment.

If you gather together a group of self-professed foreign-policy experts—whether they be neoconservatives, realpolitickers or urbane European diplomats—you can count on a sneer if you mention "inter-faith dialogue". At best, they say, it is liberal waffle; at worst it is naive appeasement. But who is being naive?

Writing fiction demands a certain innocence, a kind of naive optimism that it is possible to overcome any gulf in understanding. "All true literature rises from this childish, hopeful certainty that all people resemble one another. When a writer shuts himself up in a room for years on end, with this gesture he suggests a single humanity, a world without a centre."

It can’t really be overstressed the level of nihilism we’ve come to. It’s a system where you’re so desperate for moral comfort where you only respect a few reasons, and where those are pretty much reduced to, essentially, suffering. Suffering, of course, does not give you moral right, it does not give you foreign policy expertise. Every day you can open a newspaper, every day you can hear a politician and not from the fringe parties anymore, but from the mainstream parties making immoral moral judgments which I think need to be stopped, or at least countered.

The broader Middle East as a region is just not normal. There are too many problems that keep it from functioning well. At the same time, Islamic civilization as a whole is going through a crisis. There's a struggle between moderates and extremists, and an argument over modernity versus tradition, that ultimately will define what it means to be Muslim.

Marvel Entertainment Inc. said Thursday it is recalling five styles of "Curious George" plush dolls, totaling 175,000 units, because their surface coatings have excess levels of lead.

Many like Pradeep have no qualms in accepting that female foeticide is happening on the sly, and that no one registers for government incentives for the girl child. “Schemes don’t work. The procedures to avail the benefits are too tedious. Sex determination is easy. Families decide on their own about their children.”

But with a scarcity of women, how do they intend to have ‘families’? “That’s the way our society is. We can’t really help it,” says father Anil Kumar Grewal.

This route into imagination starts with the off button to the television and Nintendo.

Even articulate adults have a tough time defining the concept, which is why we often just call it "it" - as in, you either have it or you don't. Mystique is the lifeblood of key qualities such as glamour and cool.

What does seem clear is that in today's buzzing Information Age, mystique - that intangible it - is getting harder and harder to pull off.

"The VCs were ready to throw millions at us," he said, adding that he declined the additional funding because he wanted to maintain majority ownership and leave open the option for an equity offering in the future. He said he doesn't plan to monetize the site any time soon, adding that the company's focus is on developing the site's features and increasing the user base.

Stan Douglas’ version of "Journey into Fear" leaves the viewer guessing whether it is set in the present or maybe in the 70’s. As in earlier works, he does not offer a beginning or an end in this film but rather, he invites the gallery viewer to enter the looped film at any time: A man and a woman are arguing in the cramped cabin of a container ship. The dialogue reveals their tension; something big is at stake. He needs her confidence. He needs to persuade her. She rejects. He offers bribes and threatens murder. But mostly, the two just talk. Their conversation seems to go nowhere and more than that, it appears to go on forever as the film loops between the exterior scenes shot on the ship (are they flashbacks or flash-forwards?) and the interior scenes.

Stan Douglas has created a fixed loop of scenes within the picture track of his work. However, the dialogue accompanying these scenes, changes (almost) endlessly as a computer picks at random from different dialogue possibilities that are lip-synched through a dubbing process. As the scenes and its actions repeat themselves, the dialogue mutates continuously so that it would take days for the exact same scene and dialogue to reappear.

Stan Douglas evokes the 70’s as a backdrop for an intense psychological exchange. In his "Journey into Fear", protagonist and antagonist continuously trade places as the claustrophobia of the endless film and dialogue loop contracts until the film finally reveals its true identity, that of a machine. Its repetitions and mutations create a haunting metaphor for the perception of time in modernity. "Journey into Fear" is an endless, cyclical voyage but, when compared with its earlier iterations, one can at least intuit how the future became history.