Another month, another Chinese city drowning in a sea of thick smog. This time, it’s Shanghai, the country’s largest city, where visibility has been reduced just a few meters and people walk the streets with protective masks to shield their lungs from the pollution. The situation has become so bad that the government requires schoolchildren to stay inside for protection from the dirty air.

The new Burmese government, while tackling historic political and economic reforms, is neglecting the plight of its ethnic and religious minorities. The Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority for the western Rakhine region, continue to suffer persecution, and for some it only gets worse after they flee the country.

Some European and American officials deeply fear that violence in Syria will come home. Dozens and in some cases hundreds of people from European countries like the UK and Denmark have made the trek to the eastern Mediterranean and are fighting in the Syrian civil war. They could bring their new skills, contacts, and a hardened ideology to their countries of origin.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s choice for the new chief of Pakistan’s powerful army is General Raheel Sharif (no relation), a man said to be a “soldier’s soldier” with little interest in politics. Having been ousted and then exiled for ten years by the last army chief he selected, Gen Pervez Musharraf, Sharif was keen on making a safer choice this time around.

Having gained ground at the college level for years now, MOOCs are now making forays into primary and secondary education. A number of of professors at Davidson College are teaming up with MIT’s edX to create an online course to help high school students prepare for Advanced Placement tests. The courses will be available to anyone who wants them, either individuals who want to supplement their classroom instruction, or teachers who will use them as a teaching tool.

Tuesday’s passage of pension reform in Illinois and the federal ruling on Detroit’s pensions in bankruptcy court have heightened Chicago’s municipal pension emergency. State law demands that the Windy City must increase contributions to public employee pensions by $590 million in 2015, totaling $1.5 billion. If a deal to lower that figure isn’t reached by this time next year, Chicago could be forced to hike property taxes by as much as 70 percent, cut vital city services, or both.

Japan, China, and South Korea took a break from bickering about disputed territory to agree to exchange information on nuclear disasters. The WSJ has the story: Under the agreement, each country’s regulators must quickly provide information of nuclear accident to its counterparts in the other two countries by both email and phone. All accidents deemed […]

For the time being, Western hopes that Ukraine will begin to tilt more toward Europe depend mostly on a heavyweight boxer allied to nationalist thugs. The three main leaders of the protests are a motley bunch.

The recent Eastern Partnership saga, culminating with Ukraine’s decision to ditch the Association Agreement (AA) with Europe at the Vilnius EU summit on November 29, is a dramatic story with many plot twists. The moral of that story must still be learned if its disastrous repercussions are to be avoided.

Many in the West see “balance of power” and “spheres of influence” as antiquated and less-than-legitimate concepts and therefore largely ignore them. It’s time to ditch that conceit.