Correspondents and analysts seem to be on the verge of declaring the demise of Butcher Assad. It’s not looking good for his embattled regime: News reports quoted activists as saying fighting was raging in the southern suburbs of Damascus and near the international airport for a fifth straight day as government forces sought to dislodge […]

Pakistani religious radicals have found some new targets: septuagenarians, the dead, and Shiite minorities. The NYT has a harrowing report: For at least a year now, Sunni extremist gunmen have been methodically attacking members of the Hazara community, a Persian-speaking Shiite minority that emigrated here from Afghanistan more than a century ago. The killers strike […]

Mohamed El Baradei, the former chief of the IAEA and now a leader of Egypt’s liberals, warned in an FT op-ed that Egypt is on the brink of civil war: We are back in Tahrir Square. The situation is volatile: an Egypt bitterly divided between Islamists and the rest of the country, opening the door for […]

“All the balls are in our court now,” quipped one Japanese pundit. Rightly so. Now that U.S. President Barak Obama has been reelected, he says, all the alliance issues, including the stalled plan to relocate a U.S. Marine Corps base in Okinawa and delayed participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks, must be taken off […]

Brazil’s economy may be slowing down, but the cocaine business is thriving. Brazil is currently the second-largest market for cocaine in the world. As a result of this fact, Brazil’s government is borrowing a much reviled policy from America’s drug war: building an aggressive presence across the border to nab drug dealers before they enter […]

South Africa has fallen on hard times. Effectively ruled as a one-party state by the ANC and its controversial President Zuma, the most advanced economy in Africa is facing a host of deep-seated social and economic problems, of which the 34 striking miners shot dead by police are only the most striking example. And if this LA Times […]

Countries with serious disagreements often have their diplomats maintain a friendly facade, but China and India have raised this practice to a new level. Dai Bingguo, the Chinese state councillor, is currently in India for diplomatic talks with Shivshankar Menon, the country’s national security adviser. According to The Hindu, everything is fine, just fine between the two countries: […]

Polls are predicting that former Prime Minister Shinzio Abe’s Liberal Democratic party will take the most seats in the parliament’s lower house in Japan’s December 16 elections. Über-nationalist Grandpa Ishihara is also making strides; some recent polls have his Japan Restoration Party coming in second place. Both Ishihara and Abe advocate revising Japan’s war history, taking a […]

The U.S. is already reaping the benefits of new energy extraction techniques, but other gas-rich nations are having trouble achieving similar results. The basic obstacles are the same everywhere: environmental worries, government hangups, and a lack of technical expertise and infrastructure related to fuel extraction. The Wall Street Journal details their problems: Poland was once regarded as one […]

Developing countries are threatening to kill climate talks in Doha, the FT reports: The talks in the Qatari capital of Doha are entering their final five days. But they risk collapse, according to some negotiators, unless developed countries formally agree to pledge as much as $60bn in fresh funding by 2015.If the negotiators fail to […]