NEED TO KNOW WORLD A New Year The international hotspots that garnered headlines in 2017 will still be generating stories in the New Year. The militant group Islamic State might be a shell of itself. But just because it is diminished doesn’t mean the group has no capacity to...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Looking Back Regimes changed in 2017. A new president entered the White House, with ramifications from North Korea to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and beyond. Writing in the Washington Post, Woodrow Wilson Center Vice President Aaron David Miller and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Senior Fellow Richard...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW NORTH KOREA Deadly Speculation Imagine North Korea obliterating Manhattan and other targets in a nuclear strike in March 2019 after a series of missteps and ill-conceived signals between Pyongyang, Seoul and Washington. “Hundreds of thousands perished in South Korea and Japan from the combination of the...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW CAMEROON Speaking Up The arrest of Cameroonian-American writer Patrice Nganang in Douala earlier this month brought home a conflict that has remained obscure in the US. A literature professor at Stony Brook University in New York, Nganang criticized President Paul Biya’s handling of a secessionist movement...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW ARGENTINA All’s Fair… It’s a tossup as to whether Argentine leaders are cleaning house or tearing it down. Earlier this month, a judge in the troubled South American country indicted ex-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and members of her erstwhile administration on charges of treason and...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Back in the Game After a few weeks of relative calm – following the contentious Navy SEAL raid that some US officials now say unfortunately yielded no significant intelligence – Yemen has once again become a US flashpoint. The US launched two consecutive days of...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Excelsior The New Year’s Day attack in Istanbul occurred at the end of a bloody year in Turkey. The Associated Press on Sunday provided a long list of bombings, shootings and other attacks that occurred in the past year there – a tragic but...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Befitting End The Thursday announcement of a Russian-backed truce in Syria was a fitting end to the year. The truce follows the recent retreat of blood-soaked rebels from Aleppo, a big win for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose forces had been trying to conquer...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW NAFTA: Here to Stay With Donald Trump’s administration soon to become a reality, many are wondering how he plans to make good on his many controversial campaign promises. For Mexico, that means bracing for changes to the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA,...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Walking Among Land Mines An 81-year-old Maronite Christian admiringly called The General was elected president of Lebanon earlier this year. Michel Aoun’s ascension to the presidency of the tiny troubled country on the Mediterranean ends a hefty spell of political infighting that kept Lebanese...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW An Incendiary Mix Not a lot appears to have changed in Tibet since China cracked down on demonstrations and self-immolations in protest of Beijing’s rule eight years ago. Tibetans continue to migrate to the Tibetan plateau every summer for livestock grazing as they have...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW A Call on Christmas Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was livid over the United States’ decision to abstain from voting against a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemned settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. On Christmas Day, an angry and frustrated Netanyahu summoned...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Myanmar’s Shame Hopes were high in 2010 when Myanmar’s military junta freed Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi after 15 years of house arrest. When her National League for Democracy won a landslide victory last year in Myanmar’s first real democratic elections in a...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Once More Unto the Breach In recent years, it’s been common to hear that, while violence in the far-flung provinces of Afghanistan has ebbed and flowed, Kabul was safe under the umbrella of the US-supported central government. That’s not true anymore. On Wednesday, Taliban fighters...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Drip, Drip, Drip “Berlin Loses Its Innocence” read the headline in the global edition of the German business daily Handelsblatt on Tuesday, a day after a terrorist drove a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 and injuring 50. Germany had been...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Zuma’s Rocky Years This year was rocky for South African President Jacob Zuma. Next year could be rockier. On Monday, for instance, labor leaders claimed that Zuma conspired “like a gangster” with his security agencies to create a rival trade union to undermine workers holding...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Unnatural Disaster The fall of Aleppo was a humanitarian disaster that will likely go down in history as a shameful failure of the international community to prevent mass carnage and the destruction of an ancient city. Now the escape from Aleppo is prolonging the...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Concentrating Power Kyrgyzstan became the latest country to upend its internal politics by holding a referendum over the weekend on a range of constitutional issues. Citizens in the mostly Muslim country voted on 26 proposed amendments that required a simple yes or no answer on...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Too Big To Fail Italy’s Prime Minister Matteo Renzi is the next world leader going into battle with anti-establishment voters – and the results could be grim for the eurozone. On Sunday, Italy will hold a public referendum on constitutional reforms designed by Renzi and...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Pax Redux Colombians will get another chance at peace – though justice is another matter. The Colombian government signed a second peace agreement with leftist rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on Thursday, revising a previous peace deal that was rejected by...
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