The President of the regional Catalan government has formally called a regional secession referendum for November. The Spanish government vows to stop the vote from happening, putting the two sides on a potentially explosive collision course.

TAI editor Adam Garfinkle will be conducting an Ask Me Anything—a crowd-sourced interview hosted on the website reddit—tomorrow at 2 p.m. EDT. Start thinking of questions you’d like to ask him about the Syrian conflict now!

Modi’s speech at the UN points to a marked convergence of U.S. and Indian interests.

Can Beijing figure out what it takes to govern an increasingly sophisticated and affluent country in the 21st century? Or is it stuck in a dualistic mindset, where it feels it has no alternatives other than ugly repression or destabilizing capitulation?

As protests rage in Hong Kong and authorities sharpen their response, Chinese President Xi Jinping is finding it harder to connect with even pro-unification voters in Taiwan.

It’s easy to find oneself talking about the Ebola outbreak using generic terms, and for the numbers of casualties being bandied about to become a kind of numbing abstraction to the real human cost being borne by people all across West Africa—especially the children.

A Cuban pharmaceutical company was going to release fruity perfumes in honor of Hugo Chavez and Che Guevara. Alas, the project will never see the light of day, as the killjoys in Havana stopped the project.

Having brought Ukraine to heel militarily, Vladimir Putin is now applying economic pressure as the EU looks lamely on. In Tehran, Beijing and across the world, the message is clear: Western statesmen are not serious, they don’t think before they act and they don’t mean what they say.

Russia requires high oil prices in order to balance its budget, but crude prices have been dropping recently, despite supply disruptions in the Middle East and North Africa. What’s at play? In a word, fracking.

If polls were held tomorrow, AfD could be the official opposition.