The Cowley Road does not rate a mention in the Oxford guidebooks. It links the university with the suburb of Cowley, where British Ley land has a large and sprawling factory.

Cowley Road is fascinating, a microcosm of the changes that have come over Britain in the last twenty-five years. It has Greek, Italian, Pakistani, Indian, and Chinese restaurants and a Caribbean pub. Native English cuisine is represented only by "fish 'n' chips" shops, one of them run by Hong Kong Chinese. Finger-lickin Col. Sanders is the outpost of American gastronomic imperialism. None of these places existed twenty years ago. Levi-Strauss in Le cru et le cuit (the Raw arid the Cooked) saw in eating the basis of cultural differences. Tell me what you had for breakfast and I'll tell you who you are.

Most of us are well aware that the world is being changed by new information technologies, especially in the area of computers and telecommunications. Fewer are aware that these same technologies have stimulated major policy debates in international councils and within the economic and foreign policy-making chambers of an ever-increasing number of nations. Generally, these debates focus on the economic and political impact of technologies that enable computer data to be sent across national borders, a process known as transborder data flow (TDF). But transborder data flow has given rise to complex social and moral questions as well. At issue are such matters as national sovereignty and security, and the right of citizens to privacy and freedom of speech.

A group of New Yorkers meet in a spacious apartment off Central Park West to discuss the welfare of Paulus Kenop, an Indonesian arrested for raising a separatist flag outside a government building in his country. None of the thirteen people present has ever met Kenop and probably never will. None shares his political beliefs, yet all are willing to do their best to free him.

These educated, affluent professionals form one of Amnesty International's most effective New York "adoption groups"–Group 26. They are all volunteers who meet once a month to work on particular cases involving political prisoners.

The second government formed by Menachem Begin, following the Likud party's narrow victory in the June, 1981, elections, represented a real change in Israeli foreign policy. Dominated by a group of hard-liners committed to the ideology of "Greater Israel" and powered by a drive for regional hegemony, this government led Israel along a nationalistic and militant course, culminating within one year in a full-scale invasion of Lebanon. The election results, which gave the Likud 48 seats in the new Knesset compared with the Labor party's 47, hardly provided an unequivocal mandate for the pursuit of Begin's far-reaching political program, a program that can be summed up in the two words Eretz Yisrael—the whole land of Israel. Nor could a coalition with the religious parties, which commanded a wafer-thin majority of 61 in the 120-member Knesset, be considered a natural vehicle for bringing about such a radical change in foreign policy.