Mostrando resultados por narrador "Kevin Stillwell" en Todas las categorías

Ennahda, one of the most influential political parties in the Arab world and a major force in Tunisia’s emergence as a democracy, recently announced a historic transition. Ennahda has moved beyond its origins as an Islamist party and has fully embraced a new identity as a party of Muslim democrats. The organization, which I co-founded in the 1980s, is no longer both a political party and a social movement. It has ended all of its cultural and religious activities and now focuses only on politics.

Just after 6 PM on August 1, 2007, at the peak of rush hour, 111 vehicles were driving across the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in downtown Minneapolis when a thin metal plate in the bridge’s central span ripped. The bridge collapsed, plunging vehicles and passengers into the river more than 60 feet below. Thirteen people died, and 145 were injured.

In January 2015, after jihadists attacked the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, killing 12 people, European leaders linked arms to lead a procession of millions through the French capital, chanting “Je suis Charlie” (I am Charlie) in an expression of solidarity with the victims and contempt for their killers. Muslims all over the world also condemned the attacks, as did a number of Islamist organizations, including perhaps the most influential one - the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood.

In his memoir, The Lion Awakes, Ashish Thakkar describes how, as a young entrepreneur selling computer parts across Africa in the 1990s, he noticed that flights within the continent seemed to take longer than the distances on a map would suggest. “Were the planes slower?” he wondered. In fact, he learned, the commonly used Mercator projection vastly understates the size of Africa, and its 54 countries, relative to other continents.

The relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia has come under unprecedented strains in recent years. US President Barack Obama has openly questioned Riyadh's value as an ally, accusing it of provoking sectarian conflict in the region. According to The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, when Malcolm Turnbull, Australia’s prime minister, asked Obama whether he saw the Saudis as friends, the president responded, “It’s complicated.”

After two and a half decades, is the United States’ run as the world’s sole superpower coming to an end? Many say yes, seeing a rising China ready to catch up to or even surpass the United States in the near future. China’s economy is on track to become the world’s biggest, and even if its growth slows, it will still outpace that of the United States for many years. Beijing has used its new wealth to attract friends, deter enemies, modernize its military, and aggressively assert sovereignty claims.

Was the feud between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, first over settlements and then over Iran, a watershed? Netanyahu, it is claimed, turned US support of Israel into a partisan issue. Liberals, including many American Jews, are said to be fed up with Israel’s “occupation,” which will mark its 50th anniversary next year. The weakening of Israel’s democratic ethos is supposedly undercut-ting the “shared values” argument for the relationship.

In recent years, many discussions of the Russian economy have opened with an old joke. In the mid-1990s, John Major, the British prime minister, asked Russian President Boris Yeltsin to characterize Russia’s economy in one word. “Good,” Yeltsin said. Major, seeking more detail, asked him to elaborate in two words. Yeltsin replied: “Not good.”

The nuclear deal that the United States and five other great powers signed with Iran in July 2015 is the final product of a decade-long effort at arms control. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ranks as one of the most deficient arms control agreements in history. But Barack Obama has pledged to spend the remainder of his tenure fending off congressional pressure to adjust its terms. An even larger issue is Washington’s lack of a comprehensive Iran policy.

After Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, the Obama administration responded with what has become the go-to foreign policy tool these days: targeted sanctions. The United States placed asset freezes and travel bans on more than one hundred people, mostly cronies of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and the EU targeted almost a hundred more.

Fuel cells and the future of energy.

The Kremlin has never been afraid to assassinate its political opponents. In 1940, a Soviet agent murdered Leon Trotsky with an ice pick in Mexico City. In the 1950s, KGB agents poisoned the Ukrainian nationalist leaders Stepan Bandera and Lev Rebet in Munich. In 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian émigré broadcaster, was killed, supposedly by a poisoned pellet fired from an umbrella, on Waterloo Bridge in central London. New archival research suggests that the Soviet KGB ordered his murder.

Over the past three months, uncertainty over the course of Chinese development has intensified, with a steady flow of mostly bad economic news: yet another plunge in the stock market, which was already crumbling and kept afloat only by massive state intervention; mounting corporate debt; and a hemorrhaging of foreign exchange reserves, to name a few. The reality is that China is staring economic stagnation in the face.

In 1992, the Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the daughter of poor Guatemalan peasants, for her work promoting indigenous rights. Her prize, momentous in its own right, highlighted a sea change in Latin American politics.

Training and equipping militaries in weak states is not the panacea that the U.S. national security community imagines it to be. In many cases, the United States should look for other ways to achieve its goals.

Donald Trump’s central economic goal will be to boost U.S. economic growth. By establishing a competitive corporate tax rate, adopting a territorial corporate tax system, reducing regulation, boosting energy production, and improving trade policies, Trump can herald a new era of American prosperity.

In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the most basic requirement for President Donald Trump is to do no harm, following in the steps of past presidents. But Trump looks different.

A debate over Egyptian foreign policy and the Muslim Brotherhood.

How accurate is this picture, and to what extent were the Karzais responsible for the deterioration in U.S.-Afghan ties? That question is at the heart of Joshua Partlow's excellent A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster. As in any divorce, there are two sides to the story.

One of the greatest risks to world peace is a clash at sea between the United States and China. The risk of confrontation has grown steadily as Chinese power has increased, and especially since 2012, when China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, took power and introduced a far more assertive approach to China’s disputed territorial claims in the East and South China Seas. In East Asia’s littoral regions, China’s naval capabilities now rival those of the United States.