This week the U.S. Senate voted 99-0 to ban future “gunwalker” operations like the Obama Administration’s “Fast and Furious” debacle. “Fast and Furious” was the well-intentioned but awfully executed program headed by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF) in Arizona that let hundreds of …
Borders
French Revolution: Provinces Upending Myth Of Parisian Supremacy
Paris has always maintained a nervy relationship with the nation’s regions—a remnant, to some degree, of Jacobin centralization of the country from the capital, and imposition of policies, administrative structures, culture and language of Paris upon France’s diverse provincial populations. Indeed, in his brilliant 2007 book, …
What’s Behind Violence at the World’s Largest Gold Mine?
Rights groups are calling on Indonesia to investigate the fatal shooting of gold and copper mine workers in eastern Indonesia. In a gruesome escalation of a dispute between U.S.-based Freeport-McMoRan and workers from their Grasberg mine, security forces opened fire on a crowd of strikers, killing one man and injuring more than a …
Hiring Narcos to Murder the Saudi Ambassador? If It’s True, Tehran Is Pretty Dumb
If Iranian government operatives really did try to contract a Mexican drug cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to the U.S., as the Obama Administration alleges today, then they weren’t just being diabolical. They were being fairly stupid.
Granted, the Zetas – the drug mafia that Iranian-American Manssor Arbabsiar …
Russia’s Putin Visits Beijing: Friendly Neighbors or Strategic Competitors?
Regular readers of stories from China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency know that relations between China and nearly every country whose leader visits Beijing merit a positive appraisal. “Malawi treasures its friendship with China and is grateful for China’s selfless support for Malawi’s national development,” gushed one …
A Blow to Europe’s Far-Right: Denmark Reshapes Its Immigration Policies
When the Liberal-Conservative coalition led by Lars Lokke Rasmussen came to power in Denmark in 2001, it relied on support from the right-wing and staunchly anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party (DPP). As a result of that union, Denmark passed some of the strictest immigration and asylum laws in Europe. Among other things, its …
Another Tibetan Monk Sets Himself Ablaze—and the Karmapa’s Take on the Fiery Protests
Kham is on fire. This year, five Tibetan monks have set themselves ablaze in the ethnically Tibetan-dominated region of China’s Sichuan province that is part of an area called Kham in Tibetan. The most recent self-immolation was on Oct. 3 in a market in the town of Aba (in Mandarin) or Ngaba (in Tibetan), according to exile Tibetan …
Should the U.S. Deem Pakistan a State Sponsor of Terrorism?
It seems not a week goes by without more accusations heaped upon Pakistan’s controversial military intelligence agency, the ISI. The shadowy agency, seen by many as an enabler and tacit ally of militant extremists and terrorist groups in South Asia, had just been in headlines following a Taliban assault on the U.S. embassy and …
From the Magazine: Tibet’s Next Incarnation
He has never been to Tibet, never breathed the thin air of the high plateau, nor spun a prayer wheel in the shadow of the great Buddhist monasteries. Yet on Aug. 8, 43-year-old Lobsang Sangay was sworn in as the head of the Tibetan government-in-exile. Born in a refugee camp in India and educated in the U.S., Sangay holds no passport or …
In a Rare Reversal, Burma’s Government Listens to Its People and Suspends a Dam
The Irrawaddy River is the lifeblood of Burma. Its waters spring from the Myitsone confluence of two rivers in the country’s northern Kachin state, a largely Christian ethnic minority territory whose rebel militia has over the decades battled the Burmese military. A few years ago when Burma’s ruling junta agreed to a $3.6 …
TIME Meets Embattled Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh
Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh doesn’t act like a man with his back to the wall. Despite an eight-month-long popular uprising, major military defections, international pressure to step down and an assassination attempt that nearly took his life in June, he has made it clear that he will relinquish power only on his own terms. His …
Exclusive: TIME Meets Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is the international statesman of the moment. Greeted as a rock star in Egypt and other countries transformed by the Arab Spring, the Turkish Premier looms like a colossus over the Middle East. In recent weeks, he has been one of the most vocal world leaders to back the Palestinian …
The Endgame in Afghanistan: How Do We End the Proxy Wars?
When top U.S. military officer Adm. Mike Mullen described the Haqqani Network as a “a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence [spy] agency,” to the U.S. Senate on Thursday you could almost hear the ‘I told you so’ chorus echoing all the way from Afghanistan. Mullen accused the ISI of fighting a proxy war in …