Jonathan Ive, Apple’s longtime head of design, is now a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Sir Ive Jonathan joined Apple in 1992 and has led the design team responsible for products like the iPod, iPad, iMac, and iPhone since 1997. The might make him one of the most influential product designers in the […]

The FT reports that the Syrian economy may have contracted by as much as 10 percent in the past year, while the Syrian pound has lost one third of its former value. Given that Syria exports 95 percent of its oil to the EU, international sanctions are threatening to further cripple the economy and could […]

Bo Xilai may be gone from Chongqing, but his legacy and popularity remain very much intact. When Bo was appointed to run the mega-city four years ago, many China watchers (and Bo himself) considered Chongqing a backwater post from which he couldn’t cause too much trouble. But Bo was undeterred, and as he made his […]

For those watching Myanmar’s progress on internal reforms, as well as the ruling generals’ sincerity about them, a protest over electricity shortages is an interesting test case. On Tuesday evening, several hundred people in the commercial capital Yangon marched at Sule Pagoda, the focal point of demonstrations in 2007 and 1988 that were crushed by […]

Following the Merkel-Hollande talks last week, many have begun to speak of a softening of Germany’s line towards its indebted European neighbors. Recent weeks have seen Merkel backing down somewhat on harsh austerity pledges, and concessions to ideas like “growth” and “stimulus” have begun to creep into her public statements. Given the abrupt change in […]

Wisconsin has been the source of considerable bad news for the Democratic Party of late, particularly for their union backers. First came the loss of the solidly pro-union Kathleen Falk to a more centrist opponent in the recent Democratic primary; now it appears that even this more moderate candidate is headed for a loss to […]

New technologies continue to inject new life into higher education. Online education programs like MITx have been extremely successful in their early runs, inspiring more schools to develop similar programs. While online courses will not displace conventional forms of education, it’s looking increasingly likely that the next generation of college students will graduate with at […]

In the mid-1980s, when David Martin began his pioneering studies of Pentecostalism, this phenomenon was the elephant in the living room of the scholarly study of religion: It was well on the way of  becoming the fastest growing religious movement in history—from scattered groups in the early years of the twentieth century to what is […]

However tolerant some of the great rulers of the classical Islamic period once were, life is rarely kind to religious minorities in the Arab world today, as we’ve seen many times before. And few minority groups have fared worse than the Jews. Yemen once had one of the most vibrant and intellectually fruitful Jewish communities […]

There were hopes that the reforms Raul Castro’s government enacted last year would herald a new era in Cuban politics, one that welcomed foreign investment in an open economy. No such luck so far.Joint business ventures between Cuban and foreign companies have foundered as the government has chosen instead to reexamine or cancel existing foreign investments in […]