BERKELEY: When an economy falls into a depression, governments can try four things to return employment to its normal level and production to its “potential level. Call them fiscal policy, credit policy, monetary policy, and inflation. Inflation is the most straightforward to explain: the government prints up lots of banknotes, and spends them. The extra …

TRIPOLI, Libya: The shocking level of the last wave of Israeli-Palestinian violence, which ended with this weekend’s cease-fire, reminds us why a final resolution to the so-called Middle East crisis is so important. It is vital not just to break this cycle of destruction and injustice, but also to deny the religious extremists in the …

I’ve always loathed chess, the way you hate anything you’ve never been particularly good at. I’m not good at it is because I don’t have a brain suited to making moves that are five steps ahead of my intentions, or a drive to deliberately calculate the gains of every action I take nor a predilection …

The recent appointment of George Mitchell as special envoy to the Middle East is no doubt a positive sign of President Obama s commitment to the region, signaling that there will be immediate and direct American involvement in the Arab-Israeli peace negotiations. Mitchell, who was the architect of Ireland s Good Friday Agreement, is largely …

On his second full day in office, President Barack Obama made a major gesture toward restoring the Constitution and the rule of law by signing two executive orders: one closed the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and the other restored America to the company of civilized nations by closing so-called “black sites that facilitated state-sanctioned torture. …

CAIRO: Once again new US President Barack Obama mesmerizes Arab and Muslim populations around the world with a simple gesture, but one that speaks volumes. Obama’s decision to give his first official interview to a foreign network, Al-Arabiya, earlier this week, at a time when the region is literally up in flames in the aftermath …

CAIRO: The new US President Barack Obama has assumed his duties in the White House and here we are waiting for him to solve all the world’s political, economic, social and perhaps emotional, problems, too. Anyone who has a problem with his partner doesn’t need to write to his favorite agony aunt for advice or …

PARIS: Hollywood history is often nonsensical, but filmmakers usually have the good sense not to whitewash killers and sadists. Steven Soderbergh’s new film about Che Guevara, however, does that, and more. Che the revolutionary romantic, as depicted by Benecio del Toro in Soderbergh’s film, never existed. That hero of the left, with his hippie hair …

The ramifications of the Gaza war for Israeli politics do not appear to be profound. In contrast, they could be very significant for Palestinian politics, and this in turn could redound heavily on Israeli-Palestinian relations. In Israel, with the war over and elections scarcely two weeks away, Ehud Barak’s performance as minister of defense during …

As predicted, the three-week long Israeli war on Gaza ended with only one definite result: an eventual renewal of the previous six-month ceasefire for another year, give or take. Other military and political outcomes are less obvious and are still being shaped, with the indirect ceasefire negotiations in their infancy. Since the Gaza war had …

CAIRO: Amidst Israel’s war on Gaza, top Egyptian officials were busy with what they considered to be another more important war waged on their regime by a number of Arab satellite channels who were sharply critical of Egypt’s foreign policy. Hinting at the hollowness of their rhetoric compared to the real sacrifices the Egyptian army …

CAMBRIDGE: Last month’s terrorist assault in Mumbai targeted not only India’s economy and sense of security. Its broader goal was to smash the India-Pakistan détente that has been taking shape since 2004. The attackers did not hide their faces or blow themselves up with suicide jackets. Anonymity was not their goal. They wanted to be …

CAIRO: Last week it seemed obvious that Arabs had split into two camps. On one side were the radicals meeting in Doha, surprisingly headed by Qatar and joined by countries like Iran, Syria delegates from Hamas, all famous for publicly calling to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, or temporarily suspending diplomatic ties …

BEIRUT: Hamas is waging three wars at the same time, all deeply intertwined. Each of these wars requires top-notch military and political capabilities, advanced organizational abilities and suitable objective circumstances, all of which are neither present in nor available to the Hamas movement. Nevertheless, it insists on completing its struggle on all three fronts, in …

CAMBRIDGE: Governments around the world are now developing massive fiscal stimulus packages that will cause unprecedented peacetime budget deficits. The fiscal deficit in the United States this year is likely to exceed 10 percent of GDP. A substantial part of the increased deficit will be due to a wide range of new government spending. Under …

SINGAPORE: Debates over freedom of expression have been at the centre of Indonesia s decade-old democratic journey. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, similar issues feature prominently in ongoing political upheavals. These debates have been mainly domestic in scope, which is not surprising since all politics is ultimately local. Yet, there is something to be gained from …

CAIRO: Despite the fact that the Palestinian cause is pivotal in the discourse of violent and moderate Islamist movements, their discourse is not too different from that of the official Arab elite. This fact came across very clearly during Israel’s war on the Gaza Strip. Overall, the Islamists’ attitude towards the Gaza massacres was like …

WASHINGTON: Arabs and Jews were separated for decades before the separation wall was built in the West Bank and around Gaza. When former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat traveled to Israel in 1977, he declared before the Knesset [parliament] that such separation can only bring devastation and alienation to Arabs and Jews alike. He came to …

PHILADELPHIA: Since I was a small child, I have been taught that the powerless party always deserves “affirmative action in any unbalanced conflict before a true resolution can be settled. As a Muslim who now lives in the West, I keep trying very hard to understand why so many in the mainstream West assume that …

MELBOURNE: Louise Brown, the first person to be conceived outside a human body, turned 30 last year. The birth of a “test-tube baby, as the headlines described in vitro fertilization was highly controversial at the time. Leon Kass, who subsequently served as chair of President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics, argued that the risk …

PARIS: From the Caucasus in August 2008 to the Middle East in January 2009, is France under President Nicolas Sarkozy attempting to incarnate what might be called “the West by default, making maximum use of the window of opportunity opened by America’s presidential transition? Or is Sarkozy simply trying to capitalize on his global visibility …

LONDON: I spent the New Year in Sydney, watching the fireworks above the iconic bridge welcome in 2009. The explosions over Gaza that night were not intended to entertain, but rather to break Hamas and discredit it in the eyes of Palestinians. It was the latest resort to terrible violence in order to resolve how …

LONDON: Testifying recently before a United States congressional committee, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said that the recent financial meltdown had shattered his “intellectual structure. I am keen to understand what he meant. Since I have had no opportunity to ask him, I have to rely on his memoirs, The Age of Turbulence , …

I didn’t really like the inauguration of the new US president Barak Obama. Nor did I like the speech he delivered as he turned all the issues he addressed on their head. He pledged that everything will undergo drastic change. In our part of the world, this would be tantamount to a military coup. For …

AMSTERDAM: Prostitution is virtually the only part of the personal services industry in the Netherlands that works. One can’t get a manicure in Amsterdam without booking an appointment two weeks in advance, but men can buy sex anytime – and at an attractive price. The legalization of prostitution in October 2000 merely codified a long-standing …

BERLIN: Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has fought seven wars against its neighbors, including the recent war in Gaza. If you add the Palestinians’ first and second Intifada in the occupied territories, the total rises to nine. From a military perspective, Israel eventually won all of these wars – or at least didn’t lose …

CAIRO: On Jan. 20, 2009 history was made when Barack Obama took the US presidential oath, placing a man from a racial minority at the helm of the world’s only superpower. As a lover of American literature, the idea of America to me is a blend of the idyllic depictions of poet Robert Frost and …

NEW YORK: Today’s world hunger crisis is unprecedentedly severe and requires urgent measures. Nearly one billion people are trapped in chronic hunger – perhaps 100 million more than two years ago. Spain is taking global leadership in combating hunger by inviting world leaders to Madrid in late January to move beyond words to action. With …

NEW YORK: During my tour in Iraq as an interrogator, I often found myself face-to-face in the interrogation booth, a cramped plywood-walled room, with men who were in the upper-echelon of Al Qaeda. I conducted more than 300 interrogations and supervised more than 1,000. Most of these men had supported in some fashion Abu Musab …

THE HAGUE: As the world focuses on the inauguration of America’s first black president and celebrates an important milestone in the ongoing struggle for racial equality, recent developments across the Atlantic represent significant progress in a related global campaign to end impunity for mass crimes. In the coming days, judges sitting on the International Criminal …