President Obama has just completed an important ritual of an American presidency: on this third visit to South Korea as president he has visited the demarcation line between North and South Korea, peering into the windswept, desolate north from behind bulletproof glass.What some in the press hailed as a unique triumph of Obaman diplomacy—actually, yet […]

As the New York Times reports, Iraq is preparing to re-enter the world of Arab diplomacy by hosting this week’s Arab League meeting in Baghdad. It is the first major international gathering in Baghdad in many years; Saddam Hussein had been ostracized in the Arab world since his invasion of Kuwait.Iraq has a lot riding […]

NY Times columnist Nick Kristof makes quite a claim in the opening of his latest piece, entitled “The False Debate About Attacking Iran“: I wonder if we in the news media aren’t inadvertently leaving the impression that there is a genuine debate among experts about whether an Israeli military strike on Iran makes sense this […]

Via Meadia wishes its readers a happy belated… World Water Day?We’re the first to admit that, like many other UN-designated pseudo-holidays, March 22 frequently slips our minds. But this year, there’s real reason to think about the future of water. Speaking last Wednesday in Washington and joined by representatives from federal agencies and major American corporations, Secretary […]

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is one of the most interesting and even tragic figures in world politics.Consider his statement made in response to the horrific shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, after its jihadist perpetrator claimed to have been acting in service of the Palestinian cause. Said Fayyad: It is time for […]

We ran three big essays: While you might think that Republicans will be on the forefront of pushing America to re-think its commitment to the outmoded blue model, it may also be Democrats looking for efficient and sustainable means of delivering popular public services that catalyze the change. As the Spanish oil company YPF was unceremoniously relieved […]

The data scientists at the social media company in Palo Alto had previously produced a beautiful map of the global friendships captured by Facebook, but several more rigorous questions still remained: “how, really, is the world of Facebook connected? How strong are the ties between different segments of society, across geography and demography?” More specifically, how can […]

Despite the hubbub over China’s slowdown, Ecuador has scored big points by taking advantage of China’s undiminished hunger for natural resources. But the experience of neighboring Peru points to the pitfalls ahead.Ecuador’s leftist president, Rafael Correa, has signed away the exploitation rights for his country’s first large scale mining project, the Mirador copper mine, to a […]

In recent years the king of Saudi Arabia has won plaudits around the world for promoting interfaith dialogs. Those efforts recently received a dramatic setback when the top religious official in Saudi Arabia issued a fatwa earlier this month calling on the faithful to destroy all churches in the Arabian peninsula.The ruling came in response […]

Between rampant misconduct among some professional athletes and what sometimes seems to be a culture of winning at any costs, it sometimes seems that good sportsmanship and character are vanishing from American life. A recent article by Brad Herzog makes the important point that character and honor are still found on the country’s athletic fields.  […]