NEED TO KNOW BRAZIL The Murky Years To Come In political campaigns, as in warfare, there’s a lot of posturing, skirmishing and distracting before the real fighting starts. In Brazil, the real fighting has started. Former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, 72, has pulled out of the country’s Oct. 7...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA War and Peace Bosnia was one of the most dangerous places in the world in the 1990s, when 100,000 people died in the fighting that followed the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Some believe it could become so again. Unemployment, corruption, an exodus of...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW ROMANIA The Soul of a Nation The Constitutional Court of Romania recently decided that same-sex couples deserved the same rights as their heterosexual counterparts. “The court says a same-sex family is worth as much as a heterosexual family,” gay-rights activist Teodora Ion-Rotaru told the Associated Press. Ion-Rotaru...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW MAURITANIA Where Shackles Are the Norm Things are a little mixed up in Mauritania. Rape victims don’t report their abuse in this West African country because officials might jail them for having sex outside of marriage, Reuters reported. Police recently visited a would-be opposition political candidate, Biram...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW GUATEMALA Heads in the Sand New laser maps of Guatemala show a lost, ancient civilization sprawling yet hidden under the jungle canopy. But indigenous peoples and cultures have disappeared more recently, too. A tribunal of judges ruled last week that during Guatemala’s brutal civil war, which...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW MACEDONIA Pride and Prejudice Numerous civilizations, religions and ideologies have dominated the Balkan Peninsula over the millennia. Greeks, Slavs, Turks and others have jostled for supremacy over the centuries, securing and sloughing off fealty to one another at different points. In the context of that deep and...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW PAKISTAN Watch me! With the recent election of former cricket star Imran Khan as prime minister, many believed that Pakistan would change direction. They would be right. Khan last week extended an invitation to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the two nations’ foreign ministers to meet...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SOUTH SUDAN Same Song, Different Refrain? The government and rebel factions in South Sudan signed an agreement to end the East African nation’s civil war this month. The peace deal, inked in the capital of Ethiopia, was supposed to end a conflict that has killed at...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW JAPAN The Ghost of Moby Dick In 1986, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) put into effect a moratorium on commercial whaling in an effort to save several species of the aquatic mammals, known for their intelligence, long lives and slow breeding cycles, from imminent extinction. Nations...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW IRAQ Elections, in 3-D In Iraq, all politics is local. Iraqi lawmakers met this month for the first time since May’s parliamentary elections but failed to elect a speaker as opposing factions each claimed they had assembled a coalition large enough to form a government, Reuters...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW MALDIVES Paradise Lost The turquoise waters, white sand and glorious flora and fauna of the Maldives – an archipelago in the Indian Ocean home to around 400,000 residents – is truly a tropical paradise. That's why tourism accounted for almost one-quarter of the nation's gross domestic...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW GERMANY Past, Present and Future In its post-World War II history, Germany has worked hard to overcome its Nazi past. But events over the past few weeks have shown that keeping its dark legacy at bay is becoming increasingly difficult. According to German media, over 8,000 right-wing...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW BOTSWANA The Other Refugee Crisis The scandal over the discovery this summer of scores of elephant carcasses in Botswana illustrates the challenges to conservation presented by man-made development, poaching and climate change. Animal advocates said they counted almost 90 dead elephants in the southern African country...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW CANADA The Great Complicated North It’s been hard for American and Canadian negotiators to reach a deal on the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and it's crunch time this week. Dairy is one sticking point. Canada has blocked American “ultrafiltered” milk, used in making cheese...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW LIBYA No Way Out It’s a cliché, but it’s accurate to say Libyans are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Recently, rockets forced the closure of Mitiga International Airport near Tripoli. Earlier shuttered for a week, it had just reopened following a United Nations-brokered cease-fire...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SERBIA & KOSOVO Moving the Line It was supposed to be a meeting poised to defuse once and for all one of Europe's last remaining powder kegs. Instead, Serbian President Alexsandar Vucic's cancellation last week of a much-anticipated meeting with his Kosovar counterpart, President Hashim Thaci,...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO Rhetorical Questions Late last month, the dual-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago celebrated its 56th anniversary of freedom from the influence of the British Crown with a traditional military parade in the capital, Port of Spain. While those in power commended the nation...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW VATICAN The Spiritual and the Mundane The Catholic Church is scheduled to hold a synod devoted to young people next month. But recent events have led some church leaders to argue they need to reorganize to discuss the abuse of young people, the Wall Street Journal...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW UGANDA A Pop Star, and Relative Morality Morality has always been relative. What one person considers profane, another might consider paltry. These days, Ugandans are putting that notion to the test. Simon Lokodo, Uganda’s minister for ethics and integrity – yes, they have one of those –...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW RUSSIA What Is Irony in Russian? What a coincidence. Russian authorities jailed Alexei Navalny for 30 days in late August for organizing unsanctioned rallies against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proposed pension reforms. That meant the country’s most prominent opposition leader was behind bars on Sunday, when Russians...
Read full story →