NEED TO KNOW ISLAMIC STATE Long Fuses A series of explosions went off in southwestern Syria recently, killing more than 100 people and wounding almost 200 more. The deaths were not the result of the civil war that has been raging in the country for more than seven years,...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW ETHIOPIA/ERITREA An Olive Branch, and Thorns It's been a whirlwind few months for Ethiopia and Eritrea after the election of 42-year-old Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed in April ushered in a rapprochement between these two feuding nations. In just a few months, leaders of the two...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW MALI Guns and Butter More than five years ago, French soldiers defeated Islamic militants in Mali, paving the way for the central government in Bamako to reassert control over the country. But as Malians prepare for a presidential vote on Sunday, the jihadist threat remains real...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SOUTH SUDAN The Forever War Perpetual civil war has often seemed to be the fate of the people of South Sudan, where cease-fires and agreements come and go and the fighting grows ever more brutal. Another such deal is on the anvil this month, with the...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW PAKISTAN The Umpire’s Finger During sit-in protests against corruption in Islamabad in 2014, Pakistani cricketer turned politician Imran Khan liked to use a metaphor from the sport that made him famous. In Pakistan politics, he’d say, the army is like “the umpire’s finger,” referring to...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW CAMBODIA Fireflies and Powder Kegs Cambodian voters go to the polls on Sunday. Few believe anyone but Prime Minister Hun Sen will win, however. Indeed, most observers view the election as a total sham. Hun Sen, 65, has been in charge of the Southeast Asian country since 1985....
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW EUROPEAN UNION Winning to Lose It’s too early to say Brexit has been a failure. But even cautious voices could be forgiven for concluding Brexit has not gone as smoothly as its advocates forecast when Brits voted in 2016 to quit the European Union in...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW ZIMBABWE A Crocodile's Tears For the first time, Zimbabweans will vote this month on a presidential ballot that does not include ex-president Robert Mugabe. Mugabe, who turned 94 this year, was ousted from office in November after ruling for 37 years. The campaign has been more open...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW GUATEMALA Fact or Fiction? What do Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Russian state bank VTB and the United Nation's anti-corruption International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) all have in common? Namely, the Bitkov family, who have sparked an international firestorm that threatens to topple an...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW ISRAEL End Days Maybe Benjamin Netanyahu, or “Bibi,” leads the Jewish state at a dangerous time. Iran’s influence is growing. The antagonistic Syrian regime has almost won its civil war. Relations with the Palestinians remain abysmal. And Israel’s defenders in the US and Europe face an...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SOUTH KOREA Hard Day's Night Last year, the Singapore newspaper, the Straits Times, followed a few young professionals in South Korea whose accounts of the nation's backbreaking work culture are enough to fatigue even the most tireless of Western workaholics. Corporate culture in South Korea values...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW RUSSIA Friends and Foes Before he left for Europe, President Donald Trump reflected on his busy agenda for the upcoming week: meeting British politicians amid the Brexit crisis, NATO leaders whom he berated for paying too little for their defense and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Frankly,...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW PHILIPPINES A Culture of Violence An assassin riding a motorcycle gunned down Mayor Ferdinand Bote of General Tinio, a town around 50 miles north of Manila, in early July. On the previous day, a sniper murdered Mayor Antonio Halili of Tanauan, a city 40 miles south...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW UNITED KINGDOM Hot Air The 20-foot-long, orange inflated baby is now famous. Sporting President Donald Trump’s signature blonde coif, clutching a smartphone and wearing a diaper, the helium-filled balloon resembling those in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade has been given permission to fly above the Houses...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW NATO You've Got Mail American President Donald Trump normally takes to the Twittersphere when he has choice words for political allies or enemies. But ahead of a summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) starting Wednesday in Brussels, President Trump chose a more traditional means...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW INDIA Deadly Fake News American regulators are investigating how Facebook might have aided and abetted bad actors who allegedly used fake news to influence the 2016 US presidential election. As troubling as those developments might seem, the situation is arguably worse in the world’s largest democracy:...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW MEXICO Magic Man To call it a landslide would be an understatement. After two previous failed presidential bids, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, popularly known as AMLO, dominated Mexico's July 1 elections, securing 53 percent of the vote, according to the National Electoral Institute which...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SINGAPORE Cutting the Strings The small yet wealthy city-state of Singapore was in the international spotlight last month for hosting the historic summit between American President Donald Trump and North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un. It was the perfect venue for such an event, commented the...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW NORTH AFRICA/EU Passing the Buck After debating the bloc's refugee policies into the wee hours of Friday morning last week, leaders of the European Union reached an initial agreement on asylum reform. The agreement lacks detail. But it calls for voluntary screening centers to be set...
Read full story →A Declaration, Then and Now It's July 4, and to celebrate the founding of our nation, we at DailyChatter spoke to historian and author Emily Conroy-Krutz about early American foreign policy, and how in the past 242 years, it has changed – or not. Although our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, was written centuries ago, its words and...
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