Tomi Marjuaho repaired mobile phones for 10 years in the town of Salo in southern Finland, where Nokia, the world's top cell phone-maker, set up its wireless operations in the 1980s.
To readers of Ian Fleming's wildly popular James Bond spy thrillers, SMERSH was an omnipotent - and murderous - arm of Soviet intelligence, part of the network later known as the KGB. Fleming introduced SMERSH in his inaugural work, "Casino Royale," published in 1953, and over the years credited the organization with such exploits as the murder of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940.
President Obama is on a nine-day junket soaking up some sun on the other side of the Pacific. Aside from visiting his boyhood home of Indonesia, he dropped into Hawaii to grace the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit with his presence. In between calling corporate America lazy and complaining about how his new half-trillion stimulus package can't get passed, he's bellyaching about China, saying they need to play by the rules. A recent Gallup poll revealed that 70 percent of Americans perceive the People's Republic to be a threat, but they're not exactly sure why. Here's a list of 10 books to help the curious reader bone up on Beijing:
Could the more conspiratorial environmentalistas' interpretation of our times be correct? That is, has someone been putting something in the water, and are we all being lobotomized, even without major brain surgery?
With the echo of post-World War II growth a distant memory and a generation of stagnation continuing, Italian leadership continues to avoid the root cause of the country's economic malaise.
Perhaps the saddest truth of war is that it corrodes all it touches. In "Bitter Truth," Charles Todd's theme is war, and as is the case in his earlier novels, plot is sublimated to historic events, in this case those of World War I.
Andrew Roberts, author of "Masters and Commanders" and "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900," has produced what Gen. George Patton might call "a helluva book" - the first totally readable one-volume history of World War II, a literary and historical blitzkrieg, propelled by strong, positive prose, written with concision yet a wealth of detail, and supplied with an arsenal of sources.
The despots, thugs, scoundrels, punks and various crooks at the United Nations have it all wrong again. Imagine that. Though the details have yet to be released, the U.N. wants to try to force strict small-arms control on the world under the pretense (lie) that such restrictions will make it tougher for terrorists and other assorted subhuman scum to get their hands on guns.
For American readers, it may seem a stretch from Tom Paine to Kim Philby, from pamphlets and polemics to treason. But seen from Britain, Paine was just another of those figures, apparently produced in some abundance there, who made common cause with enemies of their nation.
