On a better-run planet, the U.S. special envoy for Iran, Rob Malloy, would just declare that all the U.S. sanctions on Iran wrongly put in place by the discredited previous administration are cancelled as of today.

Federalism is the only solution that could bring long-term peace and unity to Burma, but the Tatmadaw would die in a ditch to prevent it.

Each industry accounts for about three per cent of total emissions of human origin. They are both growing fast, and they are both very hard nuts to crack.

The centre of gravity of Israeli politics has been drifting rightward for decades, probably as a result of ruling over a large disenfranchised population in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The U.S. sanctions can go on forever at no cost to the United States, while American politicians feel virtuous and Syrians suffer, but there is a way to end this.

But there is no need for this Quad alliance. It's a waste of time and resources, and (given nuclear weapons with many triggers) an unnecessary risk.

The U.S. and its equally befuddled NATO allies stayed and stayed, finding an ever-changing array of reasons for chasing an ever-receding victory.

If I were world dictator, I would immediately place Brazil under total quarantine: nobody gets in, nobody comes out.

Before retreating, Amnesty explicitly said that it knew about his past statements but considered them 'not relevant' because of his political plight.

MBS is frightening, but he’s really not very bright. And a Saudi leader who the U.S. president won’t even talk to does not have a brilliant future.

The ‘loose’ cultures on average had five times the infection rate of the ‘tight’ ones, and eight times the death rate.

This suggests that the pattern is getting stronger—and the latitudes where the loops are stalling include most of the major ‘breadbasket’ regions of the northern hemisphere. If we’re looking at a future of synchronized crop-killing droughts and heatwaves in those regions, world food production is in big trouble.

Now the UN is getting involved: the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said it will soon question the United Arab Emirates about Princess Latifa.

To people elsewhere, it sounds like a bunch of early 20th-century Englishmen in wing collars declaring that 'the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton.'

So the first priority for the sane wing of the Republicans must be to provoke a split as soon as possible—and make sure that it looks like the Trumpites who are to blame.

What happens now? Probably a new president and commander-in-chief to replace Min Aung Hlaing within weeks, and then another prolonged period of military rule. Foreign sanctions? Definitely.

Real AI will arrive in some form in the not-too-distant future, but predicting its social and political impact is hard. As hard as it would have been for the Čapek brothers and their audience to foresee in 1921 what robo

This is not charity; it’s self-interest. So long as the virus is circulating widely in poorer countries, it constitutes an enormous reservoir in which new mutations will occur frequently.

Xi once declared that 'reunification' of Taiwan with the PRC is an 'inevitable requirement for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese people.' This makes about as much sense as saying that unification with Puerto Rico is

Alexei Navalny is probably not the man who will finally take Vladimir Putin down. What he is doing to great effect is mobilizing the tech-savvy young.

Mike Pompeo is setting slow-burning fires in plain sight, which is why a European foreign minister recently described him as a ‘political pyromaniac’—and this is his ‘scorched-earth’ policy.

The U.K. took brave and potentially momentous decision in announcing that the scheduled second shot of the vaccine would be postponed to 12 weeks after the first for everybody who hadn’t already had it.

American democracy will probably survive its current difficulties. Democracy as the default mode in the world certainly will.

There is the ‘military-industrial complex’ in every developed country, of course: millions of jobs and billions in profits. But that still depends on a perception of threat, even if the threat isn’t really there.