NEED TO KNOW MYANMAR [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/a46df425-7717-49ee-9253-a41403c49a61.png"] About Face, About Grace Ye Thein went to Rakhine state in western Myanmar around Christmas to show support for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the Southeast Asian country’s ruling National League for Democracy. Thein died after being captured by the Arakan...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW CHINA & UNITED STATES OF AMERICA [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/367b0095-8707-4f2a-9978-73a34332fd33.png"] Champagne Still On Ice The US-China trade war appears to be over. Long live the US-China trade war. American and Chinese officials announced a preliminary trade deal earlier this month, sending stocks up as traders grew more optimistic about...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW INDIA [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/6c1e91bd-d64f-473f-b468-ad3e35a0f829.png"] Made In India Indian opposition politician Rahul Gandhi is facing sedition charges for a small rhyme that refers to a big problem. Speaking at a campaign event, the Congress Party honcho said Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Made in India” slogan should be “Rape in...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW CHINA [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/cb644eae-40f4-4c10-a54b-4ccc5f9ad21f.png"] Cultural Revolution Redux An Afghan-American teenage girl in New Jersey thought of a novel way to spread the word about China’s treatment of its minority Muslim community in Xinjiang, a remote region in the country’s far northwest. She posed as a makeup artist...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW HONG KONG [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/69ea348d-c659-4ccf-8c5e-70099ea87e2c.png"] A Landslide for Democracy Pro-democracy candidates in Hong Kong won nearly 90 percent of the seats in the local legislature in recent elections. CNBC called the results a “barometer of public sentiment,” given recent violent confrontations between local activists and police over the...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW RUSSIA & CHINA [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/9cacf785-f6c7-46b5-8dc0-d08d0cf6f12b.png"] Friends, but not Besties An alliance between China and Russia has long worried American strategists. But those fears have been based on hypothetical scenarios because leaders in Beijing and Moscow historically have been suspicious of each other while they grapple with divergent...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW MARSHALL ISLANDS [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/fa4eeead-ecd6-4486-a0a9-47e0c34565ca.png"] A Tsunami of Disenfranchisement In the 1940s and 1950s, the United States exploded 67 nuclear bombs, conducted biological weapon tests and dumped 130 tons of soil from Nevada atomic sites in a concrete bunker in the Marshall Islands. Columbia University researchers recently found...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW SRI LANKA [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/a9f4f274-eeb2-4ab4-aabd-2ea652149d29.png"] The Politics of Greed Gotabaya Rajapaksa helped crush a nearly 30-year-long insurgency in Sri Lanka in 2009 when he was defense secretary under his brother, former President Mahinda Rajapaksa. Under the two brothers, Sri Lankan forces allegedly committed numerous human rights violations during...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW BOUGAINVILLE, PAPUA NEW GUINEA [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/6204c30b-6807-4a21-a5af-7ba1bc31ad1d.png"] Where Bombs and Bullets Could Not Go The civil war between Papua New Guinea’s central government and the rebels of Bougainville claimed as many as 20,000 lives between 1989 and 1998. Stemming from disputes over how to share copper revenues, the...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW WORLD [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/dce47e18-e5d0-45e9-b34c-579ae97d703b.png"] Back to the Future Lately it’s been feeling a lot like 1968. Fifty-one years ago, Americans took to the streets demanding civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War. French students set up barricades in Paris calling for university reforms. Czechoslovak protesters took...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW THAILAND [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/a4498c85-8923-491f-b73f-18aa26c5b68d.png"] The Price of Righteousness Fewer tourists these days are reserving hotel rooms, enjoying the nightlife, riding elephants and scuba diving in Phuket, the seaside resort in Thailand. “I’ve never seen anything as bad as what it is at the moment,” Paul Scott, an Australian...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW INDONESIA [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/26b68ea6-a202-483a-8e3e-f776f4ca7c3b.png"] Reformers 0, Radicals 1 Indonesia’s security minister was stabbed recently in an attack that authorities blamed on Islamic State “radicalism.” Police arrested a man and woman in the wake of the non-fatal attack on Wiranto, who only uses one name, the BBC reported. The...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW PAKISTAN & INDIA [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/bbfb3316-ea59-4b14-83cb-4a728bd5744e.png"] Coming Last Most of the focus on Kashmir lately spotlights India’s crackdown in the disputed region along the Pakistani border that it controls. But trouble has been brewing in Pakistan’s zone of control, too. Recently Pakistani police arrested 22 demonstrators in Azad Jammu...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW JAPAN [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/b51a2c6c-6c79-4bdd-a5f7-9da486138719.png"] The Half-Life of Fear International Olympic Committee President Thomas Bach wants to reassure athletes that radiation won’t taint their food when they compete in the Summer Games in Tokyo next year. Bach’s recent comments at the United Nations came after South Korean officials announced they...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW AFGHANISTAN [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/63dbd3ab-8c9f-403c-b1d4-f10b4c9a44c2.png"] We the People A Taliban suicide bomber recently killed at least 26 people at a presidential campaign rally in Afghanistan. Less than an hour later, a second suicide bombing claimed at least 22 lives in Kabul, the capital, the Washington Post reported. The blasts...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW BANGLADESH [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/5a28d85d-66cb-4ec2-95b9-62a1affd362e.png"] Dropped Calls Around one million Rohingya refugees live in camps in Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. They fled their homes in neighboring Myanmar, formerly Burma, a largely Buddhist country where officials in recent years have perpetrated a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the minority Muslim...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW INDIA [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/6c1e91bd-d64f-473f-b468-ad3e35a0f829.png"] Papers, Please Imagine being declared a foreigner in the country of your birth. That’s what happened to seven-year-old Afsana, who is one of 1.9 million people who lost their citizenship under a new drive to identify undocumented immigrants in the northeastern, tea-producing state of...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW AFGHANISTAN [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/63dbd3ab-8c9f-403c-b1d4-f10b4c9a44c2.png"] The Forever War Services in memory of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in the US might have included the announcement of a peace accord in Afghanistan. Instead, a few days before the anniversary of the attacks, which still take their toll today, President...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW PAKISTAN [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/b5669185-ec28-4ec3-8bca-4f051edcc978.png"] Protecting the Innocents Sakina Bibi innocently believed her marriage was an excuse to dress up and wear jewelry. She was only 13 years old. But her husband insisted that she prove her fertility. A month later, she was pregnant and suffering. “I had severe...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW KYRGYZSTAN [map url="https://gallery.mailchimp.com/a2e22d7f24f6d1e3464d05be4/images/1588c620-ee29-4832-8238-ceffca718aa1.png"] Buckle Up In early August, when security forces descended on the home of Almazbek Atambayev to detain him for questioning in a corruption case, the former president of Kyrgyzstan grabbed his rifle. Atambayev, 62, viewed the investigation as an unfair political attack, the New...
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