I had, of course, grown up years too early for the original G.I. Joe (b. 1964), but one spring in the mid-1980s, during his second heyday, I paid a journalistic visit to the Toy Fair, a yearly industry bash for toy-store buyers held in New York City.
When al-Fawwaz was first detained in Britain, in September 1998, he was depicted as a kind of bin Laden press secretary who distributed al Qaeda's declarations of war on America for publication and booked interviews with CNN, ABC News, and Arab reporters, including the one who made the first journalistic visit, in 1996, to bin Laden's Tora Bora mountain hideout.
The Treasury Department permits Americans to spend money in Cuba if they are traveling there for such reasons as academic excursions, cultural exchanges, religious missions, journalistic ventures and visits to relatives.
Gaza is another matter; the Foreign Office currently advises against all travel here, and visits require journalistic or diplomatic accreditation to go via Israel.
Add to that a recent Emmy nomination for a role in "Nurse Jackie," and the journalistic excuse for a visit to the Wallach-Jackson household is clear enough.
And, since saying one thing and then doing another is at the root of the issue, please forgive the lapse in journalistic accountability: a repeat visit.
On a journalistic quest, I once visited Jaffa looking for the childhood home of Sabri al-Banna — a k a Abu Nidal, the most infamous of Palestinian terrorists.
Under federal laws, U.S. travelers must meet 12 specific criteria to visit Cuba, such as journalistic activities, professional research, public performances or family visits, among other categories.
The book also has the scattershot feel of a collection of random family visits and scattershot journalistic assignments, very loosely threaded together.
Isabel decides to combine this visit with a journalistic assignment; she also toys with the notion of making a film from her grandmother's story.
