NEED TO KNOW GABON Clinging On Citizens of Gabon tuning into the national radio station early in the morning on January 7 were in for a surprise. A small group of junior military officers took control of the broadcaster and called for a revolution to oust President Ali Bongo,...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SYRIA Dreaming of Nightmares The United States will withdraw its 2,200 troops from Syria soon. Or maybe not, as USA Today’s editorial board noted. Or maybe their equipment first and troops later, the New York Times added. While the timeline might be in question, American involvement in...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW GERMANY Atlas Might Shrug In her recent New Year’s address, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany would proudly lead as the country took a seat on the United Nations Security Council for the next two years. “We must again stand up for, argue and fight more strongly...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW MALDIVES Hope in Paradise A fire recently destroyed much of Gili Lankanfushi, a secluded resort in the Maldives that TripAdvisor ranks as one of the best hotels in the world. A-list guests at the hotel fled in horror, reported Australia-based Yahoo7 News. It would be interesting to...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW AFGHANISTAN Ending the Forever War President Donald Trump could face off against Senator Elizabeth Warren, a liberal Massachusetts Democrat, in the 2020 US presidential election. But on one issue, they won’t be sparring, wrote the Washington Post. “I think it is right to get our troops out...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW FRANCE Power Politics If imminent, catastrophic climate change is a serious problem, then more people are probably going to depend on nuclear energy in the future, concluded a Bloomberg Opinion column recently. Yet France illustrates the pitfalls of splitting the atom – or going to other...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SUDAN Springtime Again The Arab Spring appears to have come belatedly to Sudan. Protests flared in the Northeast African country recently amid a dire economic crisis that many believe could topple President Omar al-Bashir, an alleged war criminal wanted on international charges of genocide, crimes against...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW BOLIVIA Backsliding When, at 16 years old, Brisa De Angulo pressed charges against a relative who she claimed raped her a year before, she faced an uphill battle in her native Bolivia. “My house was set on fire twice, I was almost run over by a...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW GAZA Unpredictable Democracy Fatah, the Palestinian faction that controls the West Bank, split with Hamas, the faction that controls Gaza, in 2007. Since then, Hamas has clashed with Israeli forces in three major conflicts that resulted in the deaths of thousands of Palestinians and scores of...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW BELARUS Toward a More Perfect Union Russia annexed Crimea, a peninsula in the Black Sea that was formerly Ukrainian territory. Could Ukraine’s northern neighbor, the ex-Soviet republic of Belarus, be next? “I can read between the lines and I understand the hints,” Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko told reporters in...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SOUTH AFRICA The Fugitives and the Reformer The Guptas own coal and uranium mines, steel mills and other enterprises that made them one of the richest families in South Africa. Today, after allegedly fomenting corruption in the administration of ex-President Jacob Zuma, they live in self-imposed...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW WORLD Rights in Context Seven years ago, Rosaura Almonte Hernández faced a Catch-22. The 16-year-old, known as “Esperancita,” or “Little Hope,” in Spanish, suffered from leukemia and needed chemotherapy. But doctors in her native Dominican Republic refused to treat her because she was seven weeks pregnant....
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW WORLD Looking Both Ways Business as usual was upended around the world in 2018. US President Donald Trump sat down with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un in Singapore in June, a first-ever meeting that will go down in the history books. The fruits of those talks have...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW CONGO A Dream Deferred Last week, election officials in the Democratic Republic of Congo delayed elections until Dec. 30. Many voters went apoplectic. One could hardly blame them. As the BBC explained, President Joseph Kabila, in power since 2001 after the assassination of his father, was supposed...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW VENEZUELA Take the Help! Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is ready for an American invasion. “We will arm the Bolivarian militia to the teeth,” he said recently, reported Newsweek, adding that the South American country’s civil militia had 1.6 million fighters. “An invading imperialist force may enter a...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SINGAPORE Rich and Crazy in Asia The romantic comedy “Crazy Rich Asians” has been a boon for Singapore’s tourism industry. Occupancy rates in Singaporean hotels have hit 87 percent, the highest in 10 years, reported Bloomberg. It’s easy to see why visitors might love the city-state in...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SPAIN A Tear in the Seams The insurgent-cum-terrorist group Euskadi ta Askatasuna – “Basque Homeland and Liberty,” or ETA – disbanded earlier this year after six decades of fighting. But violence still flares around the group’s demand for an independent country in northern Spain. Attackers seriously injured...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW TUNISIA The Spark that Changed the World Eight years ago this month, a Tunisian fruit vendor finally had enough of the low wages, corruption and indignities he and his family had suffered for years. A female police officer had slapped him in the face in...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW HUNGARY Cross-border Hate When Yugoslavia descended into civil war in the early 1990s, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians and others in the communist republic weren’t the only ones to fight. Arab jihadists journeyed to the Balkans to defend their Muslim brothers. Employing lessons they learned from Afghanistan, they...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW MYANMAR Ignorance and Consequences A gunman murdered Ko Ni while his two-year-old grandson was in his arms. A member of Myanmar’s ethnic Rohingya minority, Ko Ni was a legal advisor to the government of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. He had been trying...
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