In Jabel Mukaber, in East Jerusalem, relatives of Oday and Ghassan, the two Palestinians who attacked a synagogue this week, are ready to continue their fight.
Category: Geopolitics
A policy of war abroad, mixed with tighter border controls at home, won’t meet the challenge.
REYHANLI — At the beginning of this year, Jamal Maarouf was regarded as the new white knight of the Syrian insurrection. Over the course of just a few days in January, Maarouf and his men drove ISIS jihadists out of northern Syria’s Idlib province. Armed by the United States and Saudi Arabia, the leader of […]
The kidnapping of a Colombian general is the clearest sign that FARC guerrillas may have entered in peace talks, but have yet to give up their war mentality and false populist ideology.
Egypt is forcing civilians to move to create a buffer zone after terrorists hit again in the Sinai. From Vietnam to Algeria, such tactics have caused as much hardship as they’ve prevented.
RAQQA — Ever since ISIS captured the Syrian city of Raqqa in early 2014, residents have been consumed by fear and caution. The terrorist group has banned a dangerously long list of goods and behaviors, all of which carry a heavy punishment if violated. Most noticeably, ISIS has forbidden women from leaving their homes without the supervision of a male relative, and they must wear what is deemed proper attire, dubbed “the shield” — a long, loose dress that covers them from head to toe. Smoking is banned, while it is also illegal to sell tobacco, recordings of secular music, […]
-OpEd- BOGOTA — Mexico bleeds as criminal gangs kill the innocent and not-so-innocent, before the gaze of an impotent — or is it indifferent? — state apparatus. The latest victims were 43 student activists who disappeared in late September and, many believe, were shot dead and cut up by gangsters and policemen collaborating in the […]
Professor Asher Tishler has long been a highly respected researcher in both Israeli military and business domains. It’s high time for him to dish on those in the highest positions of power.
From the Israeli side of the border, a view of how the whole of the Middle East seems to be maneuvering.
MUNICH — It began nearly a year ago, on the weekend after Christmas. On Saturday night, unidentified individuals broke into a church in the Cologne district of Porz-Urbach. They broke open the safe in the sacristy and got hold of the key to the church. They ended up stealing money from the collection boxes, liturgical […]
Words that made news…
SAO PAULO — During my time in the early 1980s as a correspondent for Folha de S. Paulo in Buenos Aires, I covered more demonstrations of the “Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” — and then of the “Grandmothers” — than I could count. Brave women, their faces furrowed by time and pain, their heads […]
Thomas Sankara, the Marxist icon of the 1980s, was killed in a coup by now ousted Burkina Faso leader Compaore. Today’s youth movement is still inspired by the African revolutionary.
The news quantified
GAZA CITY — It’s easy to imagine his frustration, that of a professional whose fate doesn’t depend on the quality of his work or his willingness to work hard but on political contingencies. Salaheddin Abu Hassira, 50, is an entrepreneur in Gaza’s building sector. It’s a pursuit that, in this Palestinian territory, seems condemned to […]
After its annexation of Crimea, Moscow is hoping to accelerate a long dormant project to build a bridge connecting Russia across the Kerch Strait. But there is the Sochi lesson to consider.
-OpEd- PARIS — As Germany celebrates the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Sunday, we mark the passage of time. Historically speaking, time is a variable. Much can happen in a quarter century, or very little. Twenty-five years was how long military service used to last for peasants in Tsarist Russia. […]
Categories
The Last Temptation Of Pyongyang
A visit to North Korea reveals fears about the Internet’s pernicious influence on youth, but also a big push in computer science training. The market economy calls, but ‘social control’ is at risk.
In a secret location in the Lebanese capital, a 60-bed hospital treats ISIS and other Islamic extremists whose backers must pay cash in advance. Enemies share doctors where medicine is a blind business, and cash is king.
Though China remains the world leader in use of capital punishment, for the second time in three years, the list of capital crimes may be reduced. But authorities may face popular backlash.
A reporter witnesses a city fall to the hands of Boko Haram, as locals recount the brutality they’ve witnessed. Meanwhile, slim hopes for a negotiated solution.
Falling crude prices spell trouble for oil-dependent economies like Venezuela and Russia, with political consequences to follow. Meanwhile, the world’s two biggest economies may fare well.
A new survey asking Russians how they think people abroad view them and their country is overly optimistic, revealing a “warped” sense of reality.
Calais, France along the English Channel has served as a hub for UK-bound illegal migrants for more than a decade. Now Egyptian, Kurdish and Albanese traffickers are fighting for control.
Moscow is clearly testing the limits of the West, which must now put a stop to Putin’s muscle-flexing with some muscle of its own. How about a German-Polish army brigade?
ISTANBUL — The Kurds’ current battle against the Islamist forces of ISIS in the border city of Kobani is just the latest in a long, hard struggle for the Kurdish people in the regions that encompass modern Syria. An estimated 8% of Syria’s 20 million citizens are Kurds; and except for some Yazidi clans, all […]
After a religious pilgrimage to Mecca, an Arab-Israeli businessman imagines how a Saudi-brokered peace across the region could help solve economic problems for all.
Yes, it’s a minority, but too many Muslims offer religious justification for violence and subjugation – and we must be free to criticize Islam’s dark side without being branded Islamophobes.
News around the world that counts…
Germany’s state of Bavaria is overwhelmed by the number of Somali refugees, creating a crisis at schools ill-equipped to deal with not only language barriers, but serious childhood trauma.
Unlike with Washington, Moscow and Beijing agree on how the state can monitor the Internet. Kommersant reports on a new Sino-Russia partnership set to be signed next month.
Grave doubts about the health and capacity of longtime President Bouteflika are pulling Algeria apart at the seams. Who’s in charge? What happens next in this pivotal North African country?
In its bid to root out financial corruption, China’s government is hunting down fugitive suspects from Canada to Colombia, U.S. and Australia.
BERLIN — A historically loaded conflict with potentially serious consequences about compensation for Nazi crimes looms between Germany and Italy. The Italian Supreme Court in Rome has ruled that Nazi victims can sue Germany for compensation in Italian civil courts. The court ruled last week that international law’s principle of “state immunity,” which would normally […]
It’s been 20 years since the U.S. had troops in the Philippines. With new plans in the works for a Filippino-U.S. base-sharing, much has changed – both locally and geopolitically.
Radical Islamists zero in on young people in the West who are lonely and disaffected by modern life.
Meet the Burial Boys of Monrovia, whose role is no less important than medical staff in trying to stop the disease from spreading further.
A Syrian activist from the northern countryside talks about keeping alive the anti-regime, non-Islamist revolution amid the constant threat of shelling and the spectre of ISIS.
Images that made the news and caught our eye…