NEED TO KNOW BRAZIL Send in the Clowns Last week, Brazil's embattled president, Michel Temer, officially dropped out of the nation's presidential election in October. Temer, who took over the post in 2016 after President Dilma Rousseff was ousted on charges of tampering with the federal budget, isn't the...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW AFGHANISTAN Harvest of Woes An Afghan bomb squad recently tried but failed to defuse an explosive device in a car parked in an auto repair garage in Kandahar. Sixteen people, including four security officers, perished when the device detonated. Another 38 were wounded, including children. Interestingly,...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW IRAQ Waiting on a Comeback The ascent of Muqtada al-Sadr is the latest bizarre turn in Iraq’s tumultuous politics, as the country scrambles to cobble together a government. Al-Sadr has adopted many roles in recent Iraqi history, including years on end when he disappeared from public...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SPAIN Checkmate Spain's Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is in the throes of a political migraine – and it's not only due to the persistence of separatists in the semi-autonomous region of Catalonia. On Friday, the nation's primary opposition Socialist Party called for a vote of no...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW IRELAND A New Country Today Irish voters decide whether they keep the eighth amendment of their constitution, which bans abortion in most cases. The referendum has triggered soul-searching discussions about the country’s origins and future, wrote Mashable. Many women shared heart-rending stories of traveling to Britain,...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW COLOMBIA The Way We Were The Colombian government’s 2016 peace deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was supposed to help the South American country end a 52-year-long insurgency that claimed as many as 220,000 lives, and move beyond it. Now it appears as...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW ITALY It's Alive! German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron may have been able to stave off populist, eurosceptic political forces in their nations' respective elections last year. But in Italy, pegged to become the EU's third-largest economy once the United Kingdom departs from...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW IRAQ A Different Song and Dance As if geopolitical happenings in Iraq weren't complex enough, Sunday's parliamentary elections – the nation's fourth since the 2003 ouster of Saddam Hussein – pit some 6,990 candidates from 87 political parties against one another for the control...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW WORLD The Unending Debate Members of the Irish rock band U2 recently came out in favor of repealing abortion prohibitions outlined in the eighth amendment of Ireland’s constitution – a question voters will decide in a May 25 referendum. U2 deliberately announced its position and chose...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW EUROPEAN UNION The Grass of Elephants Just before they were scheduled to expire, US President Donald Trump extended stays on steel and aluminum tariffs of 25 and 10 percent, respectively, on the European Union and other key American allies last week – but only for...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW ARGENTINA Pendulum Swing When Equity International, Goldman Sachs and Centaurus Capital announced an Argentinian real-estate deal worth $300 million in early April, they did so with confidence that President Mauricio Macri’s liberalization efforts would finally stabilize the nation’s volatile economy. But Macri’s moves to kickstart markets...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW NORTH KOREA A Nobel Idea North and South Korean troops have removed loudspeakers that blared propaganda at each other from the opposing sides of the demilitarized zone on their border. The moves were the first tangible goodwill gestures that arose from the historic meeting late last...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SAUDI ARABIA Cognitive Dissonance It’s hard to hold two opposing ideas in one’s mind simultaneously. Yet that is what Saudi Arabian leaders are hoping their citizens will embrace in the coming years. The desert kingdom is an absolute monarchy that follows ultra-orthodox Islamic law. But recently Saudi King...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW INDONESIA Motion Sickness Indonesia, the world's third-largest democracy, is developing at breakneck speeds. Since the ouster of longtime dictator General Muhammad Suharto in 1998 and the nation's first democratic elections in 2004, Indonesia's extremely diverse 261 million citizens have enjoyed more political freedoms than ever before. After...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW IRAQ Mystic Chords of Memory The financial crisis, the rise of the Islamic State and the success of right-wing movements around the world make it easy to forget another controversy that dominated global headlines 15 years ago and arguably remains alive today: the American invasion...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW COLOMBIA More Than Words 2018 hasn't been the best year for the former Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, better known as FARC. A November 2016 peace deal with the Marxist rebel group ended a 52-year conflict in Colombia that had left over 200,000 people dead and...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW AZERBAIJAN The Birth of a Nation When it was founded in 1918, the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was one of the first democracies in the Muslim world. But that status was short-lived. Soviet Russia absorbed Azerbaijan into its sphere of influence only two years later. Today, after a...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW JAPAN On the Sidelines At their meeting in President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate last week, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the US president played golf and ate cheeseburgers, wrote Bloomberg. But Abe left the resort with little to show for his time. He and Trump...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW UZBEKISTAN On Defrost For 27 years, Uzbek dictator Islam Karimov regularly jailed and tortured dissenters, threatened citizens with a mighty surveillance apparatus and stifled independent media – long after the shadow of the Iron Curtain had been dispelled in other former Soviet states. After Karimov’s death...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SIERRA LEONE Deep Dive Sierra Leone recently swore in newly elected President Julius Maada Bio, a retired military commander and leader of the nation's opposition Sierra Leone People's Party, who won 51.8 percent of the vote in a March 31 runoff. Observers hailed Bio's victory, saying...
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