The chances of a man being respected and regarded highly both in his own country as well in those countries which have and have not been on the best of terms with that of his own is rare. It is rarer still if such a man happens to be only a diplomat. Diplomacy does not come naturally to a diplomat, but when the man in question is one Triloki Nath Kaul the answer is a forgone conclusion, says Subir Ghosh

When I got out of Stanford, I wanted some adventure. I had run across Peter Stackpole, and I wanted to be like him. A chap I had gone to school with was going to open an office for Life, the new magazine, and hired me to cover Hollywood at $30 a week. The first picture I took of any consequence was of a newcomer named Robert Taylor combing his hair. It was captioned "Beautiful Robert Taylor" in the first issue. That issue listed only four of the photographers on the masthead: Margaret Bourke-White, Peter Stackpole, Tom McAvoy and Alfred Eisenstaedt. The other four were myself, Bernard Hoffman and Bill Vandivert in Chicago, and Carl Mydans in New York. After I was in Hollywood for several months, I got summoned to New York. Excerpts

The notion that the "free world" has its own not so free mechanisms of mind control and propaganda is not new. But the "nuts and bolts" of the process are always fascinating and Ms. Saunders has worked very hard to provide information well beyond what was previously available in the public domain. In "Who paid the piper" she sets out to investigate the role of the CIA in funding and managing the cultural cold war. Many of the details of this effort are still hidden in secret CIA files, but now that the cold war is over, many erstwhile cold warriors are more than willing to tell war stories and settle old personal scores. This (understandable) vanity and Ms. Saunders wide-ranging efforts have uncovered a fascinating story, contends Omar Ali

December 12, 1969 the highpoint of Italy's "Hot Autumn" the country is rocked by strikes, demonstrations and an insurgent extra-parliamentary left. A bomb explodes in the Agricultural Bank in Milan: sixteen people are killed. Anarchist railwayman Giuseppe Pinelli is taken in for questioning by the police. Three days later, Pinelli (later immortalised in Dario Fo's play The Accidental Death of an Anarchist) plummets to his death from the window of police commissioner Luigi Calabresi's office. The police claim suicide, the left accuses them of murder. Book description

Women in the United States live about seven years longer than men. More than half of U.S. expenditures for health are attributed to the care of women. "What, then, is the problem with women's health care?" I am often asked. There are two answers to this question. First, we are seeing sharp rises in some serious health problems among women. For example, over the last two decades, the cancer death rates have risen twice as much for women as for men (6 percent versus 3 percent) (Brody 1995). Second, it is true that women live longer on average, but they spend most of those extra years in a state of disability and dependency as a result of myriad chronic, degenerative illnesses that befall them in older age. Although the absolute life expectancy for women has increased, the "active life expectancy" has actually decreased. Excerpts