Britain’s Channel 4 News aired a segment earlier this week that shows Syrian activists faking some parts of videos they broadcast on YouTube. In one instance, activists record themselves asking the international community for help, with black smoke swirling in the background; the activists had set the fire themselves before turning on the video camera.We […]

The situation in the West Bank is deteriorating, according to the Washington Post. In addition to a budget deficit that now tops $1 billion and a decline in the foreign aid that the area relies on, the Palestinian Authority is facing political pressures: “Most of the money is spent on security, and the security is […]

The”BRICS” are holding their fourth annual summit in India today; don’t expect world-shaping events to come from it. The grouping may have been heralded as an alternative to the Western-dominated international system, but it can‘t even establish coherent policy agenda, much less assume a global leadership role.It shouldn’t be surprising the BRICS can’t find much to […]

Earlier this year, European political junkies were treated to one of the odder displays in recent memory: a German Chancellor planning campaign stops in France for the election of a French president. This would have been unimaginable at nearly any other point in the two countries’ history; many viewed it as a sign that the […]

The Tuareg mercenaries of West Africa may have failed to save Qaddafi’s crumbling government last year, but they have had one success—toppling the democratic government of Mali, described by the FT as “one of west Africa’s most stable countries.” According to an FT report, this Tuareg revolt, carried out with weapons brought back from their […]

Social historians of the future are likely to be puzzled by the transportation of a huge rock to the Los Angels County Museum, the publicity surrounding the event and the responses of the crowds of people who observed it. For reasons suggested below, these historians may well include this event among the symptoms of cultural […]

I am traveling this week, and will return to the regular posting schedule next week.

Egyptian liberals were ecstatic over their role in the fall of Hosni Mubarak, but that victory may have been the high-water mark of their movement. The AP reports that following liberals’ poor showing in Egypt’s first democratic elections in years, Islamists took 60 of the 100 seats on the council to draft a new constitution. […]

China has been quietly expanding its business in Africa for years, but now unrest in the Sudans may be dragging it into the regional squabbles it has avoided thus far. While neutrality has served China well in its investments and business ventures in Africa, it may prove an unsustainable and even self-defeating posture, as the Washington […]

Even as French Jews are still in shock and mourning after the murder of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse, fear stalks the community. As the BBC has noted, the beating of another student at a Jewish school by anti-Semitic assailants is only the most notable example: Five bullet-holes were found in a window of the Yitzhak-Rabin music […]