JERUSALEM: The main thing that drew me to Israel was that here, you put your life on the line in a great political struggle, unlike in the West, where political struggle is something you talk about from a safe distance. The political struggle for Israelis, as far as I m concerned, is to find a …
CAMBRIDGE: Chinese officials and private investors around the world have been worrying aloud about whether their dollar investments are safe. Since the Chinese government holds a large part of its $2 trillion of foreign exchange in dollars, they have good reason to focus on the future value of the greenback. And investors with smaller dollar …
Enough condescension With reference to Daily News Egypt editorial titled “ElBaradei and the intoxication of hope (Feb. 27, 2010) I was puzzled by the analogy drawn to the Hans Christian Anderson story of the Emperor s New Clothes where ElBaradei represents the young naive child and our President is depicted as the hapless victim of …
WASHINGTON, DC: President Barack Obama nominated diplomat Robert Ford to become the first US ambassador to Syria since 2005. The step is a clear indication of a thawing US-Syrian relationship, and is also seen as a reward to Syria for recent cooperation in Lebanon and Iraq. Growing diplomatic rapprochement between Washington and Damascus comes as …
As you tour the streets of Baghdad these days, your eyes can hardly avoid the tens of thousands of posters and banners of candidates for the March 7 parliamentary elections. The Iraqi media and Arab satellite TV networks offer heavy coverage of the campaign. More than 6,000 candidates are competing for 323 seats in the …
LONDON: The usual images of Africa are of a continent mired in conflict and squalor. But this picture, based on Africa’s most corrupt regimes, is unfair and misleading – like claiming that all Europeans are guilty of “ethnic cleansing because of what happened in the former Yugoslavia. Yes, African has some failed states, but most …
LONDON: In early February 2010, a United States federal district court in New York began deciding a landmark case as to whether individuals have a “right to know about how their own genomes can dictate their future health. The case, American Civil Liberties Union v. Myriad Genetics, may have a tremendous impact on medicine and …
GAZA CITY: The changing political situation creates a need for Palestinian civil society to continually reflect on its true identity. It must decide how to approach crucial questions such as its function, relations with government, strategies and tactics, all the while not losing sight of its main raison d être of serving the Palestinian community. …
LJUBLJANA: Throughout history, political leaders have supported existing communication technologies in order to defend the system in which they rule. Today, too, governments may be tempted to protect newspapers and public TV on the pretext of “saving democracy as we know it. But efforts to block technological change have been futile in the past, and …
Americans have always believed that democracy would be that one great gift they would give the world, a treasure that we would nurture and then (hands a-trembling), pass on to others. That it was purchased, Golgotha-like, by rag-clad and starving citizen soldiers fighting a foreign king made it all the more precious – and Christ-like. …
The Harvard economist Robert Barro, writing in The Wall Street Journal, recently made an intelligent argument against America’s fiscal stimulus. After wading through the drivel of ethics-free Republican hacks and knowledge-free academic hacks who claim, one way or another, that the basic principles of economics make it impossible for government spending decisions to alter the …
“It’s when the tide goes out that you find out who has been swimming naked, the legendary investor Warren Buffet aptly remarked when the global economic crisis hit. And, as we have found out in the meantime, this is as true for countries as it is for companies. Following Ireland, Greece is now the second …
NEW YORK: Ever since the first “Tea Party convention was held last month in Nashville, Tennessee, with Sarah Palin as one of the keynote speakers, America’s political and media establishments have been reacting with a combination of apprehension and disdain. The Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has called the Tea Party …
BRUSSELS: Nearly three decades after his death, the former Egyptian president, Anwar El-Sadat, remains a controversial figure. In Israel and many parts of the West, he is best remembered for his daring trip to Jerusalem, where he became the first and only Arab head of state to address the Israeli Knesset, and his deadlock-breaking peace …
NEW YORK: Google has been widely celebrated for its loud refusal to continue censoring its search results in China. It is still unclear whether Google will continue to operate in China, but in any event we are not about to see much change in China’s Internet policy. More likely, all this “foreign meddling will merely …
Hans Christian Andersen was a genius. Two centuries on and the vast oeuvre of children’s stories left behind by the Danish author lives on. More than simple flights of fancy, his cautionary tales inspire both young and old, taking on new life and meaning at different times and diverse places. “The Emperor’s New Clothes is …
Though Iran s elections last June were fraught with irregularity and pitted the conservative leadership in the country headed by Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei against reformists led by Mir Hossein Mousavi, they have also set the tone for the future course of the nation, both domestically and externally. The spiritual leader of Iran, Khamenei …
LONDON: Studies show that poor educational attainment and professional underachievement are prevalent amongst young British Muslims. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, an independent development and social research charity, found that British Muslims are less upwardly mobile than their Hindu, Christian and Jewish counterparts. This trend appears consistent across Europe, where Muslims are almost three times more …
CAMBRIDGE: The United States Supreme court recently struck down limits on the freedom of companies to spend money on political elections. Large, publicly traded companies in other countries also often face lax limits on their use of corporate resources to influence political outcomes, fueling fears that the interests of shareholders will trump those of other …
PARIS: In 2040/2050, will demographers speak of “the white man’s loneliness in the way historians once referred to “the white man’s burden to describe the so-called “imperial responsibilities of some European nations? Demography is not an exact science. Countless dire predictions, from that of Malthus to that of the Club of Rome, have been proven …
ISTANBUL: How many revolutions can one generation manage? With poetic precision, angry demonstrators are challenging Iran s aging revolutionaries. Paradoxically, many are their own children, disillusioned by Khomeinism and the system of the supreme guardian. Revolutions devour their own children. The Islamic Republic spat out its ideological offspring once in the bloody score-settling immediately after …
BEIRUT: Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s recent visit to Turkey was a milestone in Lebanese-Turkish affairs. For the first time, Hariri and a Lebanese delegation of eight ministers met with Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkish President Abdullah Gul, Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Recep Erdogan and many other Turkish business leaders and investors. …
Despite Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki s remarks that a final deal over Iran s nuclear program is close to being finalized, Iran instead upped the ante when President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad instructed the country s atomic energy organization to enrich its uranium stockpile to 20 percent. Tehran is thus pushing the international community to rally …
It is February 2011. Barack Hussein Obama is beginning the third year of his first term as president of the United States. Mir Hossein Mousavi has begun the second year of his first term as president of Iran. American, European and UN negotiators have just concluded their eighty-fifth meeting with Iran s chief nuclear negotiator, …
PALO ALTO: My close friend Kris Olson died last week. It wasn’t after a long illness, or even after a car crash. She just went to bed at home one night, and was dead when her son tried to wake her in the morning. No drama, no long goodbyes, just.nothing. I heard about it two …
LEHAVIM, Israel: Relations between the Israeli police and the Arab citizens of Israel have been a major concern in recent years, especially following the events of October 2000 when during demonstrations the police gunned down 13 Arab citizens. A commission of inquiry formed after the events placed the blame not only upon the police but …
PALM BEACH GARDENS, Florida: The latest American Middle East peace initiative has been launched in the absence of change in the attitudes of the protagonists or in the political landscape. Is America gambling with a new round of dead-end diplomacy by packaging old wine in new bottles? The United States urgently needs Europe to take …
LONDON: Two alternative approaches dominate current discussions about banking reform: break-up and regulation. The debate goes back to the early days of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “New Deal, which pitted “trust-busters against regulators. In banking, the trust-busters won the day with the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which divorced commercial banking from investment banking and …
NEW YORK: In the weeks before and after the Copenhagen climate change conference last December, the science of climate change came under harsh attack by critics who contend that climate scientists have deliberately suppressed evidence – and that the science itself is severely flawed. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global group of …
JERUSALEM/CAIRO:Years ago the Israeli government told Rami he couldn’t travel outside his West Bank town of Ramallah, where he had no work. He then fled to Jerusalem to work at a small hotel and support his family. For years, Rami couldn’t leave Jerusalem’s Old City for fear of imprisonment for absconding. Restrictions on Rami, a …
