The famed British actress Glenda Jackson is treading the boards right now as King Lear, reciting from memory all 747 of the character’s lines during a 3-1/2 hour performance, eight shows a week. It’s an amazing encore for someone who first won accolades on film and stage decades ago and then left for a much different career as an elected politician in the House of Commons. In London, Maggie Smith, Ms. Jackson’s senior by a couple of years, is starring in “A German Life,” the disturbing real-life confessions of Brunhilde Pomsel, secretary to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

Wed, 24 Apr 2019 11:58:33 -0400

When fire struck Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral last week, my first instinct, shared no doubt with millions across the globe, was to Google it. The catalyst was less intellectual than personal: its author was Allan Temko, my late uncle.

Wed, 24 Apr 2019 11:44:24 -0400

In the argument this morning, however, the court’s five conservative justices sounded more accepting of the government’s argument that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross didn’t overstep his authority in seeking to reinstate a citizenship question. Were the 2020 census to include a citizenship question, research by the Census Bureau found that the question would decrease responses from noncitizen households by at least 5.8%, leading to an undercount of approximately 6.5 million people – about the population of Tennessee.

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 17:38:21 -0400

Sri Lanka held a day of mourning Tuesday and began to bury the dead from Sunday’s multiple bombings of churches and hotels. Authorities said suicide bombers targeted Easter worshippers and foreign tourists, killing 321 people and wounding hundreds more – making it Asia’s deadliest terrorist attack in decades. On Easter morning, as much of the world woke up to news of the attack, the tragedy seemed to fit an all too familiar pattern: one more massacre against a religious community that would heighten interfaith tensions.

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 17:28:13 -0400