NEED TO KNOW SPAIN Over the Fence Spain has a wall, or at least a fence. And still they come. Recently, around 300 African migrants stormed the fence separating Ceuta, a Spanish exclave on Africa’s northern coast, from Morocco, El País reported. More than 100 of the migrants made it...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW AUSTRALIA Staying Tuned Australian broadcasting giant Nine Entertainment recently reported rosy earnings that included a 27 percent jump in annual profits. The news in the Sydney Morning Herald was another step on what appears to be a yellow brick road for the company. Last month, Nine...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW CAMEROON A War In Any Language… Doctors, nurses and other staff are deserting their posts in Cameroon’s northern English-speaking regions as they come under attack from both sides in a bloody conflict between government troops and armed separatists. The military is attacking the health-care providers for...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW COLUMBIA No Time For Snoozing Newly elected Colombian President Ivan Duque, sworn in earlier this month, is unlikely to catch a break as a freshman president, wrote Mac Margolis in Bloomberg Opinion. There's just too much going on in this pivotal South American nation to...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW AZERBAIJAN Smoke and Mirrors An appeals court’s recent release of opposition politician Ilgar Mammadov from prison in Azerbaijan is a sign of the mixed progress toward openness and freedom in the former Soviet republic. Police arrested Mammadov in 2013 for allegedly organizing riots, Radio Free Europe...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW MALAYSIA New Faces, Old Faces Everyone was shocked when a coalition of political parties called the Pakatan Harapan swept to victory in Malaysia’s elections in May, including Pakatan Harapan candidates. Their win threw out the ruling United Malays National Organization after 61 years in power since...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW WORLD The Politics of Pipelines From the Persian Gulf's Strait of Hormuz to Canada's Athabasca Oil Sands, control over access to and transport of oil and natural gas serves as a flashpoint for showing the true colors of political and economic relationships around the world. "Pipelines...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW BANGLADESH Road Rage The protests that erupted recently in Bangladesh started over unsafe roads. Now they have shut down sections of the capital, Dhaka, and ballooned into calls for action on a host of issues, including poor governance, nepotism, corruption, and freedom of the press, the...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW CHILE Lemons to Lemonade Americans rarely think of South America as a destination for immigrants and refugees. But Chile is now experiencing an influx of newcomers that’s one of the largest immigration surges in the nation’s history. Annual immigration to Chile, the continent’s wealthiest country per capita,...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW YEMEN Peace and Prejudice This month, the United Nations' special envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, convinced both sides fighting in Yemen to come to Geneva for talks on ending the nation’s brutal civil war. With the war between the Saudi-led coalition backing the Yemeni government and...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW ROMANIA Protest Fatigue In late 2017 and into the new year, tens of thousands of Romanians marched on Bucharest in the nation's largest demonstrations since the fall of communism: They were protesting efforts in Parliament to water down anti-corruption laws in a state ranked as...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW GLOBAL TRADE Trading in Emotions Analysts wonder whether new US economic sanctions will topple or reinforce the Iranian government, Foreign Policy wrote. Leaders in Moscow are preparing a “crushing response” to proposed US sanctions against Russia to punish their alleged meddling in the 2016 presidential election,...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW BRAZIL The Wages of Disillusionment The Brazilian Supreme Court’s hearing on the South American country’s abortion laws kicked off intense controversy. Few expected the court to overturn Brazil’s tight restrictions against the procedure. But abortion-rights activists hoped the hearings would ignite further discussions and set the...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW CHINA October Surprise Japan’s stock market regained its spot as the second-largest in the world recently as investors fled China due to concerns about the burgeoning trade war between the US and the world’s most populous country. Chinese stocks were worth $6.09 trillion late last week,...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW BELARUS Reading the Tea Leaves During the Cold War, Kremlinologists grew a cottage industry out of analyzing the Soviet Union, where leaders operated without the hindrance of public scrutiny. In Belarus – the so-called “last dictatorship of Europe – one still needs to read the proverbial...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW IRAN Bold Steps and Backfires Atefeh Ahmadi, 29, took a bold step recently. "Me and two of my friends went to the subway," the 29-year-old translator in Tehran told NPR. "We sat in the women-only car and sang a well-known feminist song. We also handed out pamphlets...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW TANZANIA Bulldozing Hope Tanzanian President John Magufuli, popularly referred to as "the bulldozer" from his time as the nation's roads minister, was once viewed as an outsider capable of demolishing the deep-seated corruption that had long plagued one of Africa's most dynamic economies. But just three...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW The Big Boys Seventeen years ago, the term “BRIC” generated a lot of buzz. It was an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India and China – four large countries whose economies were making them increasingly important on the global stage. (South Africa joined the group later,...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW WESTERN BALKANS 200 Years Away Part of a region that saw Europe's bloodiest conflict since World War II, the six countries of the Western Balkans – Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo, the Republic of Macedonia and Albania – continue to face economic, geopolitical and legal challenges...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW PAPUA NEW GUINEA Superstitions, Polio and Facebook Papua New Guinea is a study in contrasts. A theater group in the southwestern Pacific country is using street theater to teach citizens about tuberculosis, a scourge that kills around 10 people daily there. Drama is a modern, innovative public...
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