Seeking to start off on the right foot, Nawaz Sharif’s newly-elected government in Pakistan is on the verge of getting a large loan from Saudi Arabia to help it keep the lights on across the country this summer—as much as $5 billion in cash and deferred payments on Saudi energy exports.The FT provides some useful context […]

The lower house of France’s legislative branch voted this week to allow the country’s universities to teach more classes in English. Up until now, French schools have been required to teach in their mother tongue. But there are some exceptions to this rule, and the proposal that just passed expanded the exceptions to this rule.The vote sparked […]

President Obama has a strategy for American counterterror policy and he is sticking to it; that was the core message of the speech the President gave Thursday at the National Defense University.Confronted by a troubling strategic and political situation in the world at large as well as in the complex conflict that he does not […]

A month ago Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s was secreted away to a Parisian hospital for a reportedly minor operation. As his stay grows longer, Algerians are growing increasingly nervous about the state of their country. The press has stoked widespread fears about the President’s health by reporting him healthy without producing any evidence to prove it. […]

As immigrant riots in Sweden extended into their sixth night, spreading for the first time beyond the suburbs of Stockholm to outlying towns, Swedes are beginning to ask themselves what’s gone wrong with their famously generous welfare state.Adrian Wooldridge, in a February Economist special report on the Scandinavian countries’ efforts to reinvent themselves, pointed to an answer: Mass immigration […]

In the past, when students at Georgia State weren’t able to pay their tuition bill, they were barred from class, which often led to their dropping out altogether. But vice provost Timothy M. Renick analyzed the university’s student data and noticed that many of the students who were unable to pay were only a few-hundred […]

One of the hoped-for legacies of Barack Obama’s presidency was a reconciliation between the US and the Islamic world. This vision has suffered a series of setbacks, mostly due to the administration’s muddled policy decisions in the Middle East and Burma.Just to drive the point home, here’s a chart from a recent Pew survey that shows how Obama’s […]

California has released its first official numbers about the monthly premiums state residents will face under Obamacare, and they’re lower than anyone expected. The consulting firm Milliman, for example, estimated that middle-tier plans would, on average, cost Californians $450 per month without a subsidy. The state’s new numbers put that same plan at $276 per […]

Andrew Pickford wrote an interesting piece on Australia’s changing neighborhood for today’s Diplomat. Nations like the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and East Timor are small, sparsely populated, and marginal in Asian geopolitics (akin to the Caribbean, perhaps, in the western hemisphere). At the same time, however, they’re mostly poor and poorly governed, and unrest and instability […]

The Kremlin can hardly believe its luck these days. With the US dithering over Syria and the EU hopelessly lost, wandering in the ruins of its euro project, Russia is enjoying plum opportunities to reassert itself on the world stage.Case in point, Cyprus. Here’s the latest from OpenEurope’s morning news digest: The Cyprus Mail reports […]