Africa’s King of Kings, the Sword of Islam, the Guide of the People and the Great Loon of Libya is gone.  The crowds kicked his lifeless body through the streets of his hometown.  Those who trusted in him and who aided and abetted his crimes, are scattered to the four winds — the lucky ones.  […]

Troubles are mounting for Turkey. Problems with the Kurds have begun to flare up along the border with Iraq just as Ankara has become more involved in the Syrian conflict. Early this week, 24 Turkish policemen and soldiers were killed by Kurdish militants. From the Financial Times: Militants of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers party (PKK) […]

An interesting new article in Al Jazeera English sheds more light on the lack of change in Egypt. Profiling a marginalized neighborhood on the outskirts of Cairo, it paints a bleak picture of the “democratic revolution” that has supposedly occurred over the past eight months: Egypt’s government is designed for a dictatorship: It is extremely […]

Amid reports that President Hugo Chavez is back in Cuba for further medical tests, the Venezuelan Supreme Court ruled that even if Leopoldo López, a popular opposition leader, beats Chavez in next year’s elections, he will not be allowed to take office. His determination to run anyway, and ineligibility should he actually win enough votes, threatens to further […]

Lawmakers must be hoping voters are lost in a corn maze somewhere and can’t figure out what Congress is doing with their money.  That’s the only explanation for the slick double cross that a bipartisan group of integrity-challenged senators are trying to pull.  The NYT nails this disturbing story: It seems a rare act of […]

Will the European Union survive the weekend?  President Nicolas Sarkozy seems concerned that it won’t and, if it doesn’t, it will be terrible news for France.  The FT reports on France’s growing angst: As Moody’s, the US rating agency, warned that France could see its credit outlook cut as a result of the growing sovereign […]

Aaron Friedberg – formerly of the Bush administration, now Asia-Pacific adviser for Romney – wants Americans to get their heads back into the Asian Great Game. From his WaPo interview: I have been concerned for over a decade that the United States government, and the country as a whole, have not been sufficiently focused on […]

According to a leaked European Commission report on the future of energy in Europe, the slow switch to greener sources of energy is going to push the cost of electricity through the roof. The FT has the story: Average electricity prices for households and businesses would rise “strongly up to 2020-2030” under all scenarios, the […]

The Protestant Academy in Bad Boll is an influential think-tank located near Stuttgart, in southwest Germany. I worked there for a year in my youth, an experience which greatly influenced my thinking about the role of the church in a modern democracy—an issue of great urgency in the formative years of the Federal Republic. The […]

Will Homs be the epicenter of a coming Syrian civil war? The city’s diverse communities are on different sides of the political conflict. A Syrian expat details Homs’ social and ethnic history, and what it means for the near future. Plus: The Economist notes with trepidation the signs that point to a coming Syrian civil […]