As a country that has too often found itself confronting the futility of its force in the post 9-11 world, the patient, well-executed US Navy mission that freed Captain Richard Phillips came as a welcome ending to the five-day standoff.

Navy Seals shot three of the pirates saying that Phillips was in “imminent danger.” A fourth pirate was detained. It turns out that President Obama had given clear orders to use lethal force if necessary to protect Phillips. And in doing that Obama has successfully navigated his first significant international crisis. It was a small confrontation in relative terms given that Iraq and Afghanistan loom so large. But small failures can have big consequences as Presidents Carter and Clinton learned all too well in their first terms.

Obama said he is “resolved to to halt the rise of piracy.” And yesterday he backed up that resolve with action and saved the life of a man whose crew see him as a hero for sacrificing his own life to save theirs. We don’t have a chance to write about too many heroes these days. But the story of the drama in the Gulf of Aden gave us a chance to do just that.

Her exclusive interview with two former officials from the deposed Taliban government offers the kind of insight on the Obama administration’s rethinking of Afghanistan and opening the door to talks with the Taliban.

On March 7, the New York Times broke the story of Obama reaching out to the Taliban as the US did to Sunni insurgents in Iraq with great success. That was an important story, but it was delivered to the New York Times on Air Force One. It was about access in Washington.

What Jean delivered to us tonight after a very long day is about the gritty, dusty reporting in the field that only comes from living in the place about which you write. She is a courageous and talented war correspondent who offers GlobalPost readers an incredible glimpse into the thinking of the Taliban and how the US might find an opening for important talks that could lead to reconciliation with some elements of the Taliban. It is a report packed with history and understanding.

It is the definition of GroundTruth.

He signed the executive order to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center within a year and shut down secret overseas CIA prisons, a roll back on a national disgrace that had subjected prisoners to years in detention without charge and subjected them to interrogations that human rights groups say is tantamount to torture.

In making that his first official act as president, he told the world that the United States is going to confront the struggle against terrorism “in a manner that is consistent with our values and our ideals.”

And he vowed to prosecute the struggle “vigilantly” and “effectively.”

For Obama, we are in a ”struggle” against terrorism: not a “war on terror,” as Bush has consistently called it. This represents a small shift in terminology, but one that speaks volumes about the approach.

If you try to fight terrorism in a “war” with tanks and troops, you lose. When you define the struggle in purely conventional military terms, it’s over.

It has to be a battle of ideas and street smarts and dogged investigative work and the skill it takes to build up a network of confidential informants. Sometimes a conventional military approach is necessary, but the real struggle for terrorism is a quiet, stealth operation that includes more wire tapping than missile firing.

Obama gets this, Bush didn’t.

Just ask the French or the British who both saw the failures of the conventional approach and saw what happens when they abandoned their own ideals in the struggle. So many Israeli counter-terrorism officials I know would agree, but that does not mean that their elected government officials have always seen it the same way. Certainly, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert doesn’t given the brutal offensive just undertaken in Gaza. What did it accomplish? Did it serve the purpose of destroying Hamas and undercutting its capability to launch rockets into southern Israeli? Time will tell.
But most experts in the region don’t think so.

I have covered terrorism for more than 16 years since the first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York in 1993.

And in every capital where I have covered terrorism from Belfast to Madrid to London to Jerusalem to Cairo to Paris and beyond there is an understanding that when a country abandons its ideals in the struggle it loses to the terrorists. It loses because it reduces its own moral standing. It falls into the trap of asymmetrical warfare.

The United Kingdom learned this in its struggle against the IRA and applied its lessons in its very sophisticated investigations and prosecutions in the London underground bombings of July 7, 2005.
Spain learned this in its long fight against the Basque separatist group ETA and also applied its lessons against those who carried out the Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004.

Did the United States learn this in Iraq – or is it perhaps in the process of the lesson? It is hard to tell right now, but for sure it seems there is now a sharper student of history in the Oval Office.

And in one of the more powerful moments of the speech, he spoke directly to the world:

“…And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.”

And in this historic moment, as many as 2 billion people from every corner of the world tuned in or linked in via the internet to hear Obama’s words about the “hope” he promised to Americans, and the hope the whole world has that America might live up to its greatest ideals.

“Those ideals still light the world and we will not give them up for expediency’s sake,” he added with some edge in his voice and as the CNN cameras turned to President George W. Bush listening to words that seemed on some level directed at the outgoing administration.

It seemed an unmistakable part of the script for the day that there was an eagerness to say goodbye to the last eight years. Some of the choreography seemed straight out of Hollywood. Now-former Vice President Dick Cheney was in a wheelchair with a cane and a grimace. Did anyone else notice that he bore an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Potter, the mean old guy in the wheel chair from the American classic “It’s A Wonderful Life.”

But the essence of the speech was to go beyond partisan politics and the bitter divisions of the past. It was a speech about the fact that there is work to do:

“Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.”

And there is indeed an enormous task ahead. This presidency perhaps more than any in history comes with extraordinarily high expectations that Obama can indeed change or “reboot,” as he put it, the way America deals with the world.

And there are many observers who believe these expectations for change — from climate change to controlling AIDS in Africa, from terrorism to tariffs on trade — will be virtually impossible for the new president to live up to.

And based on the work of our GlobalPost correspondents in the field it seems that in many corners of the world, it was quickly becoming apparent that not every place in the world chose to bask in the warm glow that enveloped the Mall in Washington, D.C. where several million people gathered to witness history.

To gauge those expectations, GlobalPost’s 65 correspondents in some 45 countries have set out in this series “For Which It Stands” to listen to people in the countries they cover and to document what this day means for them. And all day they filed into what we call “Reporter’s Notebooks”, which are essentially blogs in search of a better name. Please check out the Reporter’s Notebooks on the GlobalPost site featuring correspondents such as Seth Kugel in Brazil, Miriam Elde in Russiar, and Caryle Murphy in Saudi Arabia.

And so these questions loom large before Obama as he enters the Oval Office: If he truly is the first global president, will his worldwide constituents be patient with his promise for change? And will he ever be able to live up to all that the world expects from the United States of America?

And he stated with clear conviction his view of how he will project American leadership in the world:

“To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West – know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your first.”

“To the people of poor nations, we pledge to work alongside you to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to those nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect.”

“For the world has changed and we must change with it.”

And so today will mark the first truly global inauguration with an estimated 2 to 3 billion people turning their eyes to witness how Obama will capture this moment — more viewers than any World Cup, or Super Bowl, or Olympics or any other event in the history of television.

The world will tune in to hear what words he might choose to begin a presidency that sets out to restore not only the “hope” that Obama spoke of for Americans, but the hope the whole world holds that America might live up to its greatest ideals.

It is a moment that comes with high expectations that Obama can indeed change or “reboot,” as he put it, the way America deals with the world. And there are many observers who believe these expectations for change — from climate change to controlling AIDS in Africa, from terrorism to tariffs on trade — will be virtually impossible for the new president to live up to.

To gauge those expectations, GlobalPost’s 65 correspondents in some 45 countries have set out in this series “For Which It Stands” to listen to people in the countries they cover and to document what this day means for them.

And, based on their reporting, it seems every corner of the earth feels a connection to the new president in a way they have never connected to an American president before.

People across Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe all feel Obama is one of their own. And in so many ways, he is.

In Ireland, relations from the village of Monegal on his mother’s side have transformed the spelling of his name to O’Bama and a catchy, new Irish song proclaims, “There’s no one as Irish as Barack O’Bama!”

In Kenya, the country proclaimed a national holiday when he was elected and his extended family is being treated akin to royalty. His paternal step-grandmother, “Granny” Sarah Onyango Obama, 87, will be at the inaugural in the full traditional dress of the Luo tribe. Back home cousins and distant cousins in a small village called Kogelo all claim a connection to the First Family.

In the Arab world, Obama’s Muslim middle name has become the basis for a term of endearment. They call him “Abu Hussein,” a moniker which would roughly translate as “Papa Handsome.”

In Indonesia, school kids giggle with glee before television cameras there to record the same classroom where the next president once sat as a school child and took his lessons in the Koran just as they do now.

In Venezuela, there is a new name for a cup of black coffee mixed with cream, the “Obama.” Such a remark might smack of racism in another country. But in Venezuela, a place of many races and a sophisticated understanding of shades of white, black and brown, it is meant as a compliment to the president, an assertion that he is a kindred soul for Venezuelans.

And yes, in Kansas they celebrate Obama as a native son as well.

His American grounding in Kansas seems almost secondary to his experience in the world.

When Obama is sworn in today, millions of Americans will watch, but the event will be viewed via satellite dishes in small villages in Kenya, on static-filled televisions in crowded alleys in Jakarta, in cafes across Europe and in the sprawling apartment blocks of Beijing.

The world looks on at this event with some sense of what would have to be called envy.

At least that was a theme that came through the powerful reporting of our correspondents who asked one question in the countries where they live: What does the idea of America mean to the world?

Gershom Gorenberg, writing from Jerusalem, wrote how Israelis and Palestinians —once again locked in a brutal conflict — look at the United States on this day with a jealous recognition that America knows how to write its own history. America can redefine itself anew, and Gorenberg wrote how Israelis and Palestinians can only look on and wonder why they cannot seem to do the same.

A similar sentiment — for very different reasons — was also heard among the youth of Italy. Our correspondent Angelica Marin found them longing for a political process that might engage them in the way American youth were in electing Obama, and that they, too, might transform their political landscape in a new way.

Even in France our Paris correspondent Mildrade Cherfils found her neighbors pondering the issue of race in a way they never had before, and it’s not often that the French offer a self-effacing moment of recognition to America for living up to its promise of equality.

In Africa, there is unbridled faith that a president whose father hails from Kenya will embrace the desperate need to not just continue but enhance funding to the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar), which was started by President George W. Bush.

In the Middle East, the Arab street holds out hope that a president whose middle name is Arabic and who was clearly opposed to the war in Iraq might finally establish a reputation for America as an even-handed broker in the region and help bring about a lasting and just peace for the Palestinians and Israelis.

But at the end of the day, Obama is the president of the United States, not the world. And that reality will inevitably confront him very soon.

It will no doubt be an extraordinarily difficult task for this administration to manage down the expectations the world holds for Obama.

With an economic downturn not seen since the Great Depression, he may not be able to fund Pepfar at the levels that President Bush has proposed.

With a need to turn his attention to Afghanistan and begin his promised draw down of troops in Iraq, it is not certain that he will be able to focus his diplomatic efforts on the boiling tensions of the Israelis and Palestinians anytime soon.

The domestic needs for energy may undercut his promises to address global concerns on climate change.

And so these questions loom large before Obama as he enters the Oval Office: If he truly is the first global president, will his worldwide constituents be patient with his promise for change? And will he ever be able to live up to all that the world expects from the United States of America?

Both candidates addressed the idea of how they will seek to restore America’s standing in the world. Eight years of a George W. Bush presidency, both candidates agree, has undeniably damaged the reputation of America in the world. And so in the fall of 2008, these questions seem to resonate across the debate and across the world as it watches this debate:

What does America mean to the world?

How do we present ourselves to the world?

And what does the world think of us?

Vietnam defined itself against America. It’s birth narrative as a modern nation came in resisting an American invasion. Ho Chi Minh ’s Vietnam defeated America through patience and persistence and an unrelenting belief that it could shake off a leviathan like America with its B-52s and its Agent Orange and its ground troops and its sense of destiny.

And so Hanoi is an interesting dateline from which to observe the first debates in the presidential election in the United States at a time when America is involved in yet another fateful struggle in a distant land. This time it is the hardscrabble deserts of Iraq rather than the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam. But what the history of our involvement in Vietnam teaches us about Iraq hangs in the air over this election, particularly with the presence of Sen. John McCain as a candidate. The debate moderator Jim Lehrer even raised the question directly for McCain.

I spent some time today at a small memorial for McCain that stands on a promenade around the lake in the center of Hanoi where his fighter jet crashed as he carried out a bombing raid on a power plant in the major city of the north of Vietnam. The memorial is an abstract piece of art that pictures a US Airforce pilot suspended in a parachute and looking down at the wreckage of a plane.

All around this memorial was a modern city going about its business. There were families resting on a Saturday morning along side the lake, and young people playing fierce games of badminton and elderly couples practicing tai chi. A mighty river of motor scooters and bicycles flowed past with the sound of beeping horns and the low, grinding hum of traffic.

One young woman who works as a political reporter for a Vietnamese news agency had this take on the debate in a casual and background conversation I had with her: “There are many people in this country who like John McCain because he has a connection to this place. He knows the war here. He knows Vietnam. And he will be connected with us. But there are a lot of young people who think that it is Barack Obama who understands the world. They believe that Obama is the best leader to see that America needs to improve its image with the world. So a lot of young people are voting for him.”

Another young man who had just graduated with a degree in computer science from Hanoi Open University put Vietnam’s relationship with America in sharp focus. “We want to work with America and not for America… We see America on an equal level. I think Barack Obama understands this and I think he understands the world and how America figures in the world.”

Tomorrow I leave for Jakarta, Indonesia where Barack Obama lived and went to elementary school as a boy. I will arrive in the largest Muslim country in the world at the height of the festival celebrating the end of Ramadan. And it seems a wild — and fitting — coincidence that I am traveling from Vietnam where McCain has a deep connection to Indonesia where Obama has roots in his extraordinary American journey that goes from Kansas to Kenya through Hawaii and Indonesia and elsewhere.

I leave Vietnam having finalized a deal with a solid correspondent, Matthew Steinglass. I also completed the necessary meetings with officials from the Foreign Ministry to officially apply for a news bureau in Vietnam. Just like in China, we will be breaking new ground as the first international web-based news organization to open a bureau. While here, I also deepened our relationship with Mr. Tuan at Vietnamnet, the leading on-line news agency in Vietnam. We have vowed to work together in the future and he is planning on attending a pre-launch gathering we are holding in mid October for our board of advisers and our investors and a close circle of editors, reporters and writers who are connected to our mission. In Jakarta, I will continue signing up more correspondents and then push on to Delhi from there for the final leg of the trip.

The journey continues.

REFLECTIONS ON A BIG WEEK FOR GLOBAL NEWS AND A CALL TO NATIONAL SERVICE ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF 9-11 IN NEW YORK.

I wanted to take some time before the trip to Hong Kong to reflect on what was a pivotal week in the formation of Global News Enterprises. The team is truly starting to come together now.

We brought on board two key editors. After a job search that attracted a flood of great candidates for the senior editing positions, we are thrilled to announce that we have hired Barbara Martinez and Thomas Mucha to serve as Managing Editors.

Barbara comes to us from the Politico where she was a Deputy Managing Editor. For us, she will serve as Managing Editor – Web. She was a strong asset at Politico and one of the driving forces that helped make the website for political junkies the excellent news source that it is today. We look forward to having her strong skill set and her passion for web-based news organizations and breaking new ground in new media to our team. She honed her skills as executive editor of the Harvard Crimson and worked for three years as a reporter at The Washington Post.

Thomas will be Managing Editor – Correspondents. He comes to us after working at Crain’s in Chicago where he headed up a multimedia team that focused on covering globalization. Thomas is a 17-year veteran of journalism and brings a unique blend of television and print experience to the table. He worked for 8 years at CNN mostly on the business desk and has worked for the last 7 years in print, mostly at Crain’s. He also has a master’s degree in international relations and economics from the University of Chicago where he studied the emerging markets of China and India. He has a great eye for a story and a keen interest in unraveling the complex themes of globalization.

We are also thrilled to announce that we have hired Andrew Meldrum as a Senior Editor and Regional Editor for Africa. For those who follow news in Africa, Andrew is well known for his courage and insight through more than 25 years as a reporter on the continent. He has worked in Africa for both the Economist and the Guardian and other publications. Most of his work has been in Zimbabwe where he has courageously uncovered and challenged the injustices of the Mugabe dictatorship. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University last year.

We have had some other stellar hires on the editorial team, including Amy Jeffries who worked for many years in public radio and recently graduated from University of California at Berkeley in its News21 program, which is seeking to train a new generation for the skills they’ll need to break new ground in multimedia journalism. She will be our Web master. And Sarah Liebowitz will be joining us as a Deputy Editor. She worked most recently as a political reporter for the Concord Monitor. Before that, she worked with me in London as a bureau manager and then as a correspondent who played a crucial role in our coverage of the London bombings in July of 2005.

For me, this big week ended with a a trip on Thursday, September 11th and Friday, September 12th to New York for the Service Nation forum which brought together presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. On the seventh anniversary of 9-11, the two senators vying for the White House put aside the petty political bickering that too often marks our national politics and joined together to offer their ideas on how the country might raise a call for public service among young people.

Both men noted that seven years ago, President George W. Bush missed an opportunity to call the country to service in the aftermath of the attacks on September 11. If you remember, in the days immediately following 9-11 when the country and the world were still in shock, Bush delivered a speech where he literally encouraged Americans to “go shopping” and to go back to doing what they were doing.

Both candidates criticized Bush for that response and said their presidency would be very different. They said they would face the tremendous challenges that lie ahead — from terrorism to climate change and from the after effects of Katrina in New Orleans and the slow slide of standards in too many public schools — by calling on the skill and energy of young people in this country. And they would ask them to serve their country. Not only in the military.

But both candidates urged them to join Teach for America or City Year or the foreign service to help the country in a time of tremendous challenges. The forum was a tremendous success and was organized by a dear friend of mine, Alan Khazei, the co-founder of City Year and now of a new organization called “Be The Change.”

You might ask what a conference on national service has to do with our venture at Global News Enterprises. GNE is not a public service institution, it’s a for-profit media company. But still it is our great hope that our correspondents work in the field of international journalism will be of service to the country.

At Global News Enterprises, we want to give young reporters a chance to take up the calling to be foreign correspondents, to go out in the world and cover it. We want them to pursue a passion for international reporting and help bring stories to light that are currently going uncovered in so many corners of the world. We think our mission fits in with the goals of Service Nation and the call to action that the forum highlighted.

I was in New York for two days for the forum, and it was great to be back. I worked as a reporter in New York City for many years for the New York Daily News before I landed at The Boston Globe. And on this trip on this somber and sacred anniversary, I went to Ground Zero and felt the powerful emotions that are still there for all Americans when they think about what happened that day.

For me, September 11th opened a long 7-year journey of reporting in Afganistan and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and then in Madrid for the train bombings and in London for the underground bombings. I reflected back on that reporting journey and I thought about how many of my colleagues who worked — or are still working — in Afghanistan and Iraq are now struggling to find work as foreign correspondents.

So many news organizations have cut back on or in many cases abandoned their mission to cover the world. And it makes me realize that Global News Enterprises has an incredible opportunity to fill a void in international news coverage for Americans that is glaring. The challenges before us in creating a new web-based international news organization are extraordinary, but we are pulled along by the feeling that what we are trying to do is important.

And the team we are building is all passionately dedicated to making it a success. It won’t be easy, but I feel a hell of a lot better trying than I did at a newspaper where every day you could feel the energy draining from the mission. It’s a big decision to have left my life in newspapers and to have taken on this new startup, but it is also exciting as hell. I think we have a real chance to radically redefine international reporting in the digital age. There is a revolution going on and I guess I just want to be out there — and want to build a team that wants to be out there — whipping molotov cocktails and storming ramparts for the cause. (Not literally, of course.)

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10

THE LAST DAY OF A GREAT RIDE IN NEWSPAPERS …

I guess the first post on this blog should be about the last day of what I call one of the “last great rides in newspapers.”

On my last day in the newsroom of The Boston Globe, the huge rolls of newsprint pounded off the trucks onto the loading docks down in the press room as they always do at the end of the week before the big Sunday run. The thud shakes the newsroom. I always loved that sound. It represented the heft of a big city newspaper. The weight of the organization and the importance of what it does.

But on that last day in March of 2008, that thud sounded more like distant thunder. It sounded ominous. And there are indeed dark clouds on the horizon for the newspaper industry, and an ominous feeling is setting in in far too many newsroom. It is a pervasive feeling from the highest realms of management to the cubicles of reporters in the newsroom that the current economic model simply cannot sustain the level of excellence in journalism that it always has. I hope that is not the case, but the feeling in newsrooms like the Globe is palpable. It is felt most intensely at going away parties for veterans. And at the Globe there had been far too many of them in recent years. They usually are a congregation in the middle of the newsroom of editors and reporters huddled around a sheet cake and coffee where stories are told — funny, touching, heartfelt stories — about the work of a great reporter. Lots of talk of the good old days. They felt like Irish wakes without the drinking. The metro editor Brian McGrory said the rectangular sheetcakes had in his mind come to resemble “tiny coffins.” I didn’t want to have one of these maudlin gatherings and I , like just about everyone at the Globe, had grown to hate sheetcake. So instead we gathered at Doyle’s, a great old pub in Jamaica Plain, and raised pints of Guinness and I listened to my editors and colleagues rip me apart with great humor. Some of them were true.

When I joined the Globe in early 1994, the paper was flush with cash. It was truly in the heyday of newspapers which had soared in revenue and circulation throughout the late 1970s and 1980s. They had come of age out of big cities like Boston with a brash confidence. The newsrooms had swagger, and they had solid revenue to back it up. I grew up in Massachusetts and the Globe was a part of my daily life. In many ways, my family was the core of its readership. Every morning, the Globe was on the breakfast table and there was push and pull over the sports page. We were a typical Boston Irish family that through one generation after the next had drifted out to the suburbs. And in so doing we mirrored the demographic sprawl of the paper and we embodied the solid readership that the paper sought for its advertisers.

I came to the Boston Globe from the New York Daily News and for me it was truly a homecoming. It was the paper I had always wanted to work for. And a big part of the draw to the Globe — beyond the obvious hometown pull — was that it was a news organization that had foreign bureaus and where I could live out a long-held dream to become a foreign correspondent. I got the chance in 1997 when the Globe named me the Middle East Bureau Chief based in Jerusalem. My wife, Julie, and I went to Jerusalem together with our newborn son, Will. he was only three months old when we left in the summer of 1997 to move into an old stone home in Jerusalem. The title “Bureau Chief” looks good on a business card, but it’s a preposterously grand title considering I was the only Globe correspondent in the Middle East. My wife, Julie, would tease me about this. She’d say, “Whoa! You’re the bureau chief … and (pause for ironic effect) you’re the entire bureau!” Or she would call me in the office and quip, “Is this the bureau chief? Sorry, am I interrupting you in the middle of a meeting with all of your personalities?”

Behind the humor was , of course, truth. The Globe was a small paper to have seven foreign bureaus. But I loved that it aspired to be a paper that covered the world for its readers. And in doing so, it punched above its weight class. We had a tradition of great foreign correspondents form Curtis Wilke and David Greenway to Ethan Bronner and David Filipov. Often, our correspondents were known as the best reporters and most talented writers in their patch. I was very proud to be part of that tradition.

I was the Globe’s Middle East “bureau chief” for four years and covered the Israeli-Palestinian peace process through the height of its greatest hopes and good intentions. And I was there when it all came crashing down and the two sides descended back into violence. I covered the intifada on the frontlines from the moment it began. And through it all our family was growing. We had two children born in the Holy Land. Riley was born in Jerusalem in 1999. And Gabriel was born in Bethlehem in 2000. When Palestinian suicide bombers would strikes Israeli buses or the Israeli tanks would pound a Palestinian village, we would hear the carnage in our garden. The bombings in particular would rattle the windows they were so close. When this happened, birds that would congregate in a lemon tree in our yard would flutter up out of the three and fly away. And our oldest son, Will, would ask, “What’s that Dad?” We would always tell him it was thunder. One day after a bombing and the usual question and the answer which was a lie, he asked, “Dad, if that’s thunder how come it never rains?”

That moment underscored a growing and undeniable feeling that Julie and I shared that having a family in Jerusalem was becoming untenable for us. We felt great sadness and great guilt at the idea of leaving a city we loved and friends on both sides of the conflict behind as we prepared to leave. We arrived in London in early September of 2001. Our moving truck dropped our boxes on September 11, 2001. I was unpacking my office when the news came on the radio that changed the world forever.

I spent most of the next five years covering the dramatically unfolding events of September 11 and its aftermath through the start of the US air strikes in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda to the Qala-i-Jangi unprising in Mazar-e-Sharif which was probably one of the most wild battles of the first war of the 21st century. That was the place where hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaeda being held in prison, rose up and seized the prison and fought against US and British special forces for several days. It was the battle where the American Taliban John Walker Lindt emerged from a basement of the fortress to tell a tale of how a California kid ended up taking part in a “jihad” against America.

After Afghanistan, I covered the trans-Atlantic divide that led up to the war in Iraq and then I covered the war itself. I was in the north waiting for the war to begin and covered it from the north down as Baghdad fell and the front lines pushed from Kirkuk and the Mosul and Tikrit and finally the entire regime of Saddam Hussein. For the next several years, I would be in and out of Iraq and covering a spate of bombings in Madrid and London and then looking back and realizing that I had become a war correspondent. I never thought of myself that way, but indeed that was we were covering.

By 2005, I was fairly burned out and was awarded a Nieman fellowship at Harvard University, which is an extraordinary opportunity to have one year to explore literature and history and art and music and to throw open all the doors of learning that Harvard has to offer. It was a great year.

But in the spring of 2006 I returned to the Globe and could feel that it was a changed place. It was battered by the economic realities of running a big city newspaper and was struggling to find its way. Within a year, the Globe made the decision to cut its entire foreign staff After 22 years in the daily newspaper business and 14 years at the Globe, I have left traditional media and set out on a new venture.

And so now, as you know if you have been reading this blog, we are starting the first fully web-based international news agency. The company is called Global News Enterprises and we will announce the domain name of the website closer to the launch which is set for February 2009.