NEED TO KNOW Russian Roulette Negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin must feel a bit like Russian roulette. You know there’s a bullet in the chamber somewhere; you’re just not sure when it will go off. With his 2014 invasion of Ukraine and his 2015 bombing campaign in...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Winter is Coming To paraphrase Game of Thrones, winter may be coming for the country that sparked the Arab Spring. At first glance, the ouster of Tunisian Prime Minister Habib Essid at the end of July seemed like a routine bit of parliamentary politics. But...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Two Steps Back India’s most popular prime minister in decades just pushed through the country’s biggest economic reform since its 1991 liberalization – at least in theory. But as always seems to happen in India, the big step forward came with two steps back. The...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Desperate Times Desperate times call for desperate measures, the saying goes. In Venezuela, those measures provide as good a yardstick as any for how desperate the situation has become. Not only has beleaguered President Nicolas Maduro appointed a general indicted by the U.S. for drug trafficking...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Losing Faith For the past 22 years, South Africa has been running on faith. Steeped in the lore of Nelson Mandela’s long struggle and eventual victory against apartheid, the 104-year-old African National Congress (ANC) has done better than win elections. The storied political party has...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW A Spectacle of Catastrophe? Rattled by impeachment and corruption scandals, a vicious recession and a public health emergency thanks to the Zika virus, Brazil would have had a memorable 2016 regardless of what’s coming next. Yet those crises will take a back seat to the...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Being Different When Syrians, Iraqis, Afghans and others began flooding into Europe last year, some warned that terrorists might be among them. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel opted for an open-door policy for the beleaguered refugees – whose plight echoed that of the East Germans...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Pushing Poland For once, the pope is more liberal than the people. Pope Francis confronted conservative Poland head-on this week, pushing the country’s staunch Catholics to rethink their condemnation of homosexuality and rejection of refugees. But it’s unclear whether policymakers in Warsaw will heed his...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Russian Dolls Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump sent geopolitical ripples hither and thither on Wednesday when he called on Moscow to locate the 30,000 emails his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton deleted before investigators began looking into how she routed State Department messages through a...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Taking Stock Two years after the short yet brutal war between Israel and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, there are few signs of recovery in Gaza. Known in Israel as "Operation Protective Edge," the seven-week conflict in July and August 2014 killed more than 2,100 Palestinians,...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW The Summer of Discontent After years of disastrous economic policies, Zimbabweans' patience with 92-year-old President Robert Mugabe appears to be wearing thin. “The campaign that we are getting into, we are very (sure) that by Aug. 31, Robert Mugabe will be done away with,” Happymore...
Read full story →NEED TO KNOW Web of Wolves What makes a terrorist? Events over the weekend in Germany -- as well as new revelations about the truck driver who killed 84 people in Nice earlier this month – suggest that radicalization is less straightforward than commonly imagined. The line between...
Read full story →Need to Know Elton John Won’t Beat AIDS Sixteen years after the decision that turned the tide against HIV/AIDS, the once-dreaded disease is easily dismissed as somebody else’s problem. But as delegates again met for the International AIDS Conference in Durban, South Africa – the city where it...
Read full story →Need to know The More Things Change Turkish officials have launched a purge on a scale that evokes a communist dictatorship cracking down on dissidents in the early 20th century rather than a NATO member in the 21st. Turkish leaders estimate that 100,000 people were involved with the...
Read full story →Need to know No Peace To Keep The African Union has approved a peacekeeping force for South Sudan. But, in a twist that illustrates the long-suffering country’s dilemma, the troops can’t deploy unless they receive permission from the South Sudanese government. President Salva Kiir doesn’t want the troops. He’s...
Read full story →Need to Know The Same Old Same Old Tens of thousands of people congregated on the Promenade des Anglais Monday to observe a moment of silence in honor of the 84 people killed when an angry young man drove a 19-ton truck through a crowd watching Bastille...
Read full story →Need to Know Shock but Little Awe The failed coup d’etat in Turkey was shocking. But, as the dust from the brief chaos settles, it’s not hard to see that the putsch wasn’t a total surprise given the country’s trajectory in recent months. In the run-up to the...
Read full story →Need to Know An Eye for an Eye “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind,” is one of Mohandas K. Gandhi’s most famous aphorisms. But events in Kashmir this week suggest that the army and police have read the words of the Mahatma like...
Read full story →Need to Know Pottery Barn Rule Redux As the United States plans to deploy 560 more American soldiers to help the Iraqi government retake Mosul from the Islamic State, some Iraqis are preparing for a humanitarian crisis. As many as one million people, or half the city’s residents,...
Read full story →Need to Know Troubled Waters When Wang Zhenzhong looks to the ocean, he sees China. "For thousands of years, fishermen have fished our ancestral sea, the South China Sea,” the 35-year-old resident of Tanmen, a port town in China’s southernmost province of Hainan Island told NPR. Filipino leaders don’t...
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