That one of their own aircrafts crashed, killing 150 people, is disaster enough. But that a colleague deliberately murdered all those people is inconceivable to pilots and staff of Lufthansa and its low-cost carrier Germanwings.
Category: Geopolitics
TEL AVIV — When the coalition agreement is signed and the next Israeli government is officially formed as expected next month, it will have exactly 107 days to pass the state budget that will chart the country’s economic course. So even while the rest of the world may focus on the profiles of the incoming […]
Andean towns like Pariacaca, in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca, are keeping a cautious eye on rapidly melting glaciers, from which giant blocks of ice can break off into lakes, creating huge and potentially deadly waves.
RAS BAALBEK — There’s a 140-kilometer strip of land on top of the mountains just north of Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley that marks the border with Syria. It’s here that ISIS has dug in, appropriating a remote corner of Lebanon where the terror group has accumulated militants, resources and hostages to gear up for an impending […]
-OpEd- PARIS — Some say that television shows are to our time what serials were to 19th century literature, an inexhaustible source of entertainment and conversations. During “urbane dinners,” it has become obligatory to demonstrate knowledge of this new cultural front. “Tell me which shows you watch and I’ll tell you who you are.” Besides […]
The European Union was built atop the rubble of so much bad history, meant to build democracy and keep peace among neighbors. But something came undone, and the union itself is now in mortal peril.
Separated families, refugees and a deeper sense of national loss for Ukrainians who saw an entire region of their country taken over by Russia last March.
Lula da Silva spent liberally when the Brazilian economy was booming, leaving Dilma Rousseff to face the deferred impact of the global recession. His personal popularity aside, the country’s current woes are largely his fault.
To gauge the ways the civil war has affected all of Syria, a look at seven cities on the fourth anniversary of the first uprising against the regime. A chronicle of death and life going on.
The moderate president symbolizes the hope of rapprochement with the West in nuclear talks, but he must also deal with the regime’s hardliners. Can he manage to strike a deal with the enemy?
BEIJING — Relations between Myanmar and China remain tense after a bomb from a Burmese military plane fell in the Chinese border province of Yunnan last week. The bomb killed four people and injured another nine and also prompted a good number of Burmese to taking refuge on the Chinese side. China responded to the […]
Categories
Why The Jihadists Fear Tunisia
The biggest threat to murderous Islamists are Muslims who believe in democracy.
The assassination of democratic reformer Boris Nemtsov prompts a look back over the past two decades of Russia flirting in vain with economic and political reforms.
Tunisia is in a state of shock Thursday after the terror attack on the National Bardo Museum in the capital, which left 19 people dead and 44 wounded, most of them foreign tourists. Wednesday’s attack in Tunis was a devastating reminder, both inside and outside the North African country where the Arab Spring started more […]
A final survey by Calcalist focused not on the candidates, but on the issues. It doesn’t sound good for incumbent Benjamin Netanyahu.
Brazilians are furious as their personal prosperity slips away amid reports of runaway corrruption. All the while, President Rousseff looks forced to impose new austerity measures. Which way out?
GENEVA — Drones are increasingly hovering over our heads. In the past six months, dozens of them were seen flying in France over sensitive Parisian sites, military installations and nuclear power plants. And with the threat of terrorist attacks, these machines are a real source of concern for the military and the police, and not […]
Ambitious and unafraid to anger foe or friend, the 38-year-old Speaker of Parliament may be Greece’s most powerful woman. And fighting corruption is at the top of her agenda.
Scandals and stagnation, crime and curbs on democracy are spreading across the region. Are things about to take a sharp turn back to the bad old days?
-OpEd- PARIS — With just days to go before the Israeli election, it becomes increasingly difficult to predict who will win the race. The latest polls show the center-left Zionist Union candidates Isaac Herzog and Tzipi Livni leading over Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ruling Likud party. Of course, the country’s proportional system means […]
With the Panama Canal set to expand and Nicaragua planning its own huge canal, the Caribbean is bracing for big shifts in shipping traffic. On the French islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique, hard questions from both fishermen and environmentalists.
Obama’s executive order slapping sanctions on Venezuelan officials is ostensibly in defense of liberty. But it could just as well be another of a long line of aggressive American interventions.
GORNJA MAOCA — In Sarajevo, you come to realize that all the essential things in the world have been affected by war, or rather, by the circumstances of war. You realize the economy’s upheaval, the general misery and, above all, the turmoil in each individual life: embarrassment, uncertainty, anxiety. “It’s like being in a prison […]
President Rousseff has abandoned big spending projects in favor of currency devaluation to fuel exports. Will it save her presidency? And more importantly, this BRICS nation’s floundering economy?
Despite death threats, three young Syrians are fighting the jihadists terrorizing their country with the only weapon they have: pure mockery.
This 53-year-old German encryption coder helped the U.S. whistleblower stay one step ahead of the NSA. Now, he’s getting financial support from some big players to expand his work.
There are countless precedents for acts of cultural vandalism like ISIS perpetrated against the Mosul museum. A society’s art and cultural history may be its very embodiement of power.
Governments are taking Twitter to task for inadvertently helping jihadists “recruit, incite and horrify.” But they’re forgetting what a valuable law enforcement resource the platform is too.
Supervised and armed by Iran, young Shia volunteers have launched a major battle against ISIS in Tikrit. But taking revenge on local Sunnis is not likely to pacify the region. And what about Uncle Sam?
Just as companies are graded by social rating agencies on their environmental record, they’re now being judged on whether they have ties with Israel. It’s the latest weapon in the ongoing “BDS” Boycott movement to protest Israel’s
Far from the murders and intrigue swirling at the Kremlin, or the war rumbling in Ukraine, most of Russia lives in a strange post-Soviet state of denial like one finds in the city of Yelets.
Shia militiamen, Sunni clans, al-Qaida, Iran and Saudi Arabia all have their hands in the rapidly shifting sands of the poorest state in the Arabian Peninsula. Yemen is everybody’s business.
By a twist of history and weight of geopolitics, Greek law recognizes the authority of Sharia in settling civil matters for the country’s Muslim minority. One widow is fighting to end this European anomaly.
Khaled walked into an ISIS recruiting office and volunteered to fight — for $30 a month. Now he’s a refugee in Turkey. Here’s how he got from there to here.
Juan Pablo Escobar has dug up many memories about his notorious father, the late Colombian gangster Pablo Escobar. He is conscious of the crimes, but also that his was a loving father.
A new ceasefire, which has not been fully observed, should be in effect in eastern Ukraine. But the announcement of the creation of a military air force could bring dangerous escalation.
Victor Gregg, a 95-year-old World War II veteran and the only Briton who was on Dresden soil during the Allied bombings on the German city, believes Churchill “should have been shot.”
-OpEd- PARIS — There’s something both pathetic and surrealistic about France’s obsession, at the moment, with a rather unremarkable economic reform bill (the “loi Macron“) while to the east and to the south, in Ukraine and Libya, real threats are edging closer to our continent. It’s time to wake up! Twenty-five years after the fall […]
The Turkish government still sees the downfall of the Assad regime as the No. 1 priority. Washington is most concerned with the battle against ISIS. Is there room for an alliance?
It’s not important whether Islam is “a part of Germany,” as the country is debating. Fascism once was utterly German. The real question is, will Muslim leaders accept reason and freedom as the central values of society?