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 […]

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 […]

The noose continues to tighten around Iran. As representatives from the P5+1 countries (the permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) prepare to meet in Baghdad tomorrow to discuss Iran’s nuclear program, leaders from the G-8 summit took the unusual step of, well, doing something. The G-8 countries agreed to release oil from their strategic […]

The Rasmussen polling organization is out with a shock poll that the entire Washington establishment needs to study: 51 percent of voters surveyed said they wanted all US troops out of Europe, now. Only 29 percent favored keeping the troops where they are.US troops have been in Europe since World War Two. In the Cold […]

Boko Haram remains faceless and mysterious to Nigerians, but it does appear to have a strategy and organization, according to an interview with Ahmad Salkida, the Nigerian journalist widely considered to know the group more intimately than almost anyone. In 2005, Salkida began praying at Mohammed Yusuf’s mosque, where Boko Haram originally took shape, was arrested with […]