Back in February when Egyptians took to the streets to overthrow longtime Israel’s longtime friend and ally Hosni Mubarak, many Israelis fretted over what ill wind the “Arab Spring” would bring. Would a more democratic Egyptian government veer away from the U.S.-Israel axis and ally with Hamas? Would it abrogate the Camp David treaty …
London’s streets have burned before, and not only during the Great Fire of 1666 or the Luftwaffe’s 1940 “Blitz”. The late 1970s saw England’s economy mired in recession, mass unemployment leaving youth alienated, angry and without hope. The streets burned with a continuous series of clashes between angry young people and authorities, …
You say you want a revolution? Not now, mate, can’t you see we’re busy?
“It’s the economy, stupid,” was the focal message around which Bill Clinton organized his against-the-odds 1992 campaign victory over President George H.W. Bush. The incumbent had presided over the soft landing of the collapsing Soviet empire and driven Saddam …
Washington may have cut an unlovable deal to avert a default on its debts, but U.S. and global stock markets are tanking anyway. That’s because the measures agreed Tuesday can’t reverse the slide of the U.S. economy — its fundamentals, to use a phrase beloved by politicians, are less than sound. So, what the world sees in America’s …
“Liberal Interventionists” in Washington had hoped, last March, that the decision by the U.S., Britain and France to launch U.N.authorized military action in Libya represented a new Western willingness to protect civilians under threat by their own regimes. The paralysis of the same governments and the wider international community …
Only a madman would have predicted, even nine months ago, that Egyptian TV’s ramadan special, this year, would be the trial of Hosni Mubarak. It’s a compelling spectacle, to be sure, the erstwhile epitome of the Arab “strongman” now laid low on his sickbed inside a courtroom cage, forced to answer for the violence unleashed by his …
With tens of thousands of young protestors on his streets in a social justice movement sparked by a housing crisis, some Israeli commentators have suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s best hope for quelling a domestic “rebellion” lies in changing the subject to the question of peace with the Palestinians. But …
A few short years ago, the mass resignation of the top echelon of Turkey’s military leadership might be interpreted as the equivalent of that moment, on a beach, when the waves suddenly roll so far out to sea that thousands of yards of sand are revealed: Any coastal dweller will tell you that’s the moment to run for the hills because a …
Global Spin’s selection of weekend rental movies to bring you up to speed on the week’s events by Tony Karon and Ishaan Tharoor.
Grapes of Wrath
As the world watches a dysfunctional U.S. political system flailing helplessly in the face of an economic catastrophe slowly destroying the …
(Update: The mysterious circumstances of Thursday’s killing of General Abdul Fattah Younes, military chief of staff of the Benghazi-based Transitional National Council, suggest the rebel war effort is teetering in crisis. The Independent reports that Younes had been in rebel custody at the time of his killing, having been arrested …
Throughout NATO’s war in Libya, the operation there has been compared with the one in Kosovo in 1999, in which 72 days of bombing Serbia forced the withdrawal of government forces from the province, where they’d been engaged in a campaign of “ethnic cleansing” against the ethnic-Albanian majority. But while Libya has dragged on twice …
The biggest problem on the desk of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a protest movement — not of Palestinians, but of young Israelis, who have poured onto the streets in their tens of thousands demanding that their government resolve a growing housing crisis. Sure, the Obama Administration has failed in its effort on …
There was a time when a blond, blue-eyed nationalist looking to violently rid Europe of its “alien” immigrant population could be reliably assumed to hate Jews. It’s no longer quite that simple.
Anders Behring Breivik insists, in his rambling 1,500-page manifesto released on the day of his confessed rampage that killed 76 …
