Foreign Policy

Most Americans know roughly as much about the U.S. military as they know about the surface of the moon. It's not that we don't like the military -- we love it! We just don't have a clue who's in it, what it does, what it costs us, or what it costs those who join it. And as a nation, we don't particularly care, either.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, meticulous chronicler of American social class, famously confided to Ernest Hemingway that "the rich are different from the rest of us."

"Yes," was Hemingway's laconic reply. "They have more money."

These days, the same could be said of the American military. Is the military different from the rest of us? Yes -- it has more money.

At 6 p.m. Taipei time on Friday, June 1, Ho Tsung-hsun was suddenly shut out of his Facebook account. When he tried to log back in, a message in a red box announced: "This account has been disabled." Ho, a veteran activist and citizen journalist on environmental and social issues in Taiwan, immediately took a picture of the message, then wrote an angry blog post on a Taiwan-based citizen journalism platform. He insisted that he had not violated any of the site's community guidelines.

For centuries, the Yangtze River -- the longest in Asia -- has played an important role in China's history, culture, and economy. The Yangtze is as quintessentially Chinese as the Nile is Egyptian or the Rhine is German. Many businesses use its name. But if you log on to the Internet anywhere in China, type the Chinese characters meaning "Yangtze River" into Google's Hong Kong-based search engine, and click "search," the browser screen will go blank with an error message: "This webpage is not available." (Here is a screenshot taken this morning by an Internet user in Beijing.)

In 2005, Peter Mahnke, a resident of the English town of St. Margaret's, Middlesex, set up a community website. For the past seven years, he and a handful of local volunteers have been publishing regular updates about local events, parks, new businesses, weather, and train schedules. All G-rated and uncontroversial.

Exceptions to the rules

Photographer Louie Palu began visiting Kandahar, a southern province that is one of Afghanistan's largest, in 2006, as the insurgency returned with new violence and urgency, permanently changing the tenor of the war. Originally overlooked by most Western media outlets, the region eventually became the focal point of the fight against the Taliban. Rather than focus on specific battles, Palu's portraits look at the region over the course of years, charting the evolution of one of the region's most beautiful -- and violent -- areas.