NEED TO KNOW Learning Peace Week-long celebrations concluded Friday in the Yari Plains of the southern Colombian savannah as fighters from the Front of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, came to a unanimous decision about the future of their movement. Starting Monday, they will become...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW The Bouncing Bozo Remember when Oliver North was on TV every day to discuss US chicanery in Nicaragua? No? That’s because the Senate hearings on the so-called Iran-Contra affair took place nearly 30 years ago. One guy who remembers them well, however, is Nicaragua’s 70-year-old...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Resentment and Tulips At first, Ethiopians protested for minority rights. Now it's tulips. Protests in the country started in early summer. But the latest violence, which broke out at the end of August, is an escalation in the worst civil strife that Ethiopia has seen...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Of Balconies and Airstrikes Early on Tuesday, US Secretary of State John Kerry was insisting that the ceasefire in Syria that he negotiated with Russia was still alive despite numerous breaches of the agreement. "The ceasefire is not dead," Kerry told Reuters in New York, where...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW A Bright Spot Jordan has taken a stride in distancing itself from the political and humanitarian tumult of its neighbors in the region. On Tuesday, the kingdom is slated to hold parliamentary elections under new rules that expand representation to parties outside of ruler King...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Business As Usual After the attacks in the US over the weekend, the American presidential election is likely to become more contentious as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump jockey over the threat of terrorism. In Russia, the debates are more one-sided. "The Kremlin is feeling quite...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW The Scramble for Samarkand Longtime Uzbek strongman Islam Karimov wasn't even cold in his grave before the geopolitical wrangling for influence in the former Soviet republic began. A week after the long-time dictator's death on Sept. 2, Uzbekistan's parliament named Prime Minister Shavkat Mirziyaev to...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Berlin Redux Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is gearing up for regional elections in the city-state of Berlin on Sunday. It's hoping for a repeat of its surprising upset over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats in her home state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Grand Delusions, Real Threats North Korean President Kim Jong-un works hard to keep a tight lid on the internal workings of the so-called Hermit Kingdom. Lately, he is not doing a great job. From the high-profile defection of a London-based diplomat to the alleged executions of...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Anyone Here Non-Aligned? Questions surround the 17th summit of the Non-Aligned Movement scheduled to convene on the Venezuelan island of Margarita on Tuesday. The movement was founded in the 1960s for countries that sided neither with the United States nor the Soviet Union in the...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Of Princes and Pilgrims Millions of people from across the globe are currently making their way to the holy city of Mecca– it’s a miraculous sight. The Hajj is one of the five pillars of Islam: The world's 1.6 billion Muslims are supposed to make...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW I’ll Do It My Way British Prime Minister Theresa May keeps saying, “Brexit means Brexit.” But it turns out almost nobody really knows what that means. May has created a new Department for Exiting the EU to figure it out. So far they haven’t made...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Once More, With Fairness Europe is calling for a recount in Gabon's recent presidential election. It's the latest escalation in a largely overlooked conflict, on a largely overshadowed continent, that unfortunately grapples with such issues far too often. European Union election observers noted "anomalies" in the...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW The Lasting Pivot US President Barack Obama’s last big trip to Asia ended this week with his visit to Laos following the Group of 20 meeting in China. It's message, the same over the past eight years, "we care," was overshadowed by a brouhaha...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW A Democracy Grows in China World leaders were in China Monday for a Group of 20 summit that reminded everyone yet again of the expanding geopolitical power of the world’s most populous country. But Nathan Law and Hong Kong voters had a different message in...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Two Twilights As US President Barack Obama manages the end of his tenure in office, he's also arguably presiding over the twilight of the United States' status as the world's indispensable superpower. Or so some pundits say. Over the weekend, on the eve of the G20...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Wars, Civil and Proxy Russia’s military excursions in Syria have not only tipped the balance of power in the country’s civil war toward Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, they’ve also put Moscow ahead of the United States in the proxy war that is now raging...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW From Oil to Starbucks While countries in North Africa and the Levant have seen much turmoil since the Arab Spring kicked off in 2011, Saudi Arabia has been a regional exception, seemingly impervious to the internal strains that have ripped apart the societies of...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW The Hemorrhage of Souls One year into Europe's refugee crisis, the continent has come to grips with this immense challenge, right? Wrong. Refugees are still flooding into the continent. What's more, those who are arriving often join others stuck in tent cities where they've been channeled...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW The Kingdom of Crackdowns The tiny island kingdom of Bahrain has remained relatively stable in a region upended by turmoil, especially since the so-called "Arab Spring" five years ago. Even so, widespread riots rocked the country in 2011 when activists and Bahrain's Shiite majority took...
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