NEED TO KNOW Mainstream and Mavericks The first round of voting in the French presidential election on Sunday was already billed as a showdown between mainstream and maverick politicians that could determine the fate of Europe. “Vote for president could reshape Western world,” read the Australian Broadcasting Corporation...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Neighborly Relations, Hard Lines A resurgent Taliban has posed problems as the US and Afghanistan discuss how to move forward in their 15-year-long relationship. That resurgence, in turn, has raised issues about the Taliban and Afghanistan's neighbors – notably Pakistan. Observers have long said that...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW No 'Plan B' Argentinian President Mauricio Macri has pushed the country down an ambitious path of reforms since his election win in 2015. The measures introduced by Macri – the former mayor of Buenos Aires and a well-known businessman – have so far included floating...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Squaring the Circle During Chinese President Xi Jinping's meeting with US President Donald Trump in Florida earlier this month, the leaders of the world's two largest economies made strides toward avoiding a full-scale trade war. Now North Korea might help erase whatever misgivings remained between...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW A New Turkey Elections are supposed to decide issues. The vote in Turkey on Sunday has almost certainly not done that. By a narrow but definitive margin, Turkish voters opted to grant new sweeping powers to their president, abolishing the office of the prime minister and...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW The Lost Children Three years ago, Boko Haram militants kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in Chibok in northern Nigeria. Nearly 200 are still missing, USA Today reported Thursday. The fate of the missing Chibok girls isn’t the only sad tale in Boko Haram’s long reign of terror. Human...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Wanted: A Compelling Alternative South African President Jacob Zuma has been called the Teflon Don thanks to his unflappable ability to bounce back from scandal after scandal. The 74-year-old leader of the African National Congress, or ANC, has survived attempted ousters and a court...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW An Appeal to the Masses Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte was in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday meeting with King Salman. On their agenda was the plight of Filipino workers who were kicked out of the desert kingdom without pay, as well as the living conditions...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Mutual Mistrust Even under the best circumstances, tensions between Russia and the US would probably have been high ahead of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's visit to Moscow Tuesday. A number of "difficult subjects" had made their way onto the agenda for the highly...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW The Confidence Crisis In the short run, the Islamic State’s attacks on two Coptic Christian churches in Egypt on Palm Sunday appear to have spurred solidarity between Muslims and Christians – who comprise around 10 percent of the country’s 91 million people. “Your terrorism...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW The Old Song and Dance Serbians took to the streets in recent days in protest against the election of Aleksandar Vucic as president. “Nobody intervened,” he told Politico. “When you have all your rights to protest against someone without any kind of disturbance and interruption,...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW The Art of Trade The leaders of the world's two largest economies are meeting each other for the first time today. One has no doubts about their agenda. "It is all about trade," President Donald Trump told the Financial Times in an interview about his...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW No U Turn It's been about eight months since the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. Many observers were skeptical of the grounds for Rousseff's ouster – manipulating Brazil's federal budget. Nonetheless, they believed her exit would give the country a fresh start to deal...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW The Final Fight After six months of fighting, the battle for Mosul – the Islamic State's last remaining stronghold in Iraq – is reaching a fever pitch. Backed by US-led air strikes, Iraqi forces launched a campaign to reclaim the city in October. Iraqi leaders...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW A Studied Approach Prime Minister Viktor Orban has consolidated power and undercut civil liberties in Hungary for years. Now he’s squaring off against one of the richest men in the world and one of the most respected institutions that arose from the ruins of his...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW A Legal Coup Despite years of political repression, human rights abuses, economic crises and food shortages, much of the world has held out hope that President Nicolás Maduro would maintain democracy in Venezuela. That faith has now been exposed as wishful thinking. On Thursday, news...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW More Than Words After Germany and the Netherlands blocked Turkish officials earlier this month from lobbying Turkish expatriates in the two European countries to vote in favor of an upcoming constitutional referendum, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accused Dutch and German leaders of...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Lucky 777 Carrie Lam, Hong Kong's former number two leader, became the city's chief executive after winning two-thirds of the vote in elections on Sunday. But her win amounted to only 777 votes in a territory of over 7 million people. Despite calls for popular...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW The New Norm of Low Tech Investigators are still trying to figure out why 52-year-old British national Khalid Masood drove a car into a group of pedestrians on Westminster Bridge last week before trying to storm the Houses of Parliament in London. They still...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Of Flags and Ducks The tug of war between protesters and police over opposition leader Alexei Navalny in the streets of Moscow on Sunday was an apt metaphor for Russia today. While CNN’s Fareed Zakaria recently dubbed President Vladimir Putin “the world’s most powerful man,”...
Read full story →