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 …
Borders
China’s Uighur Problem: One Man’s Ordeal Echoes the Plight of a People
Who is Ershidin Israil? An Islamic terrorist? A brave journalist? Or a Chinese spy? This much appears to be clear. In 2009 after riots convulsed Xinjiang, the tumultuous northwestern region of China that is home to the ethnic Uighur people, the 38-year-old teacher decamped to neighboring Kazakhstan. Ershidin’s friends and relatives …
New Violence in Kosovo Could Pose a Quandary for an Overstretched NATO
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 …
Why A Fresh Face Isn’t Enough to Move India and Pakistan Closer to Peace
The new Pakistani foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, landed in India yesterday for bilateral talks and, not surprisingly, the Indian media have heralded her arrival with intense interest. From a land-owning family with a long history in politics, Khar is decidedly younger and more glamorous than the usual diplomats making the …
Thousands of Afghans Flee Shelling at Border, Leaving Worrying Vacuum Behind
The specter of unintended consequences has haunted most military decisions made since the U.S. declared its war on terror nearly a decade ago. And so it should not be surprising that the death of Osama bin Laden — once envisioned as the blow to end this now-global fight — may itself be causing a fresh and unforeseen aftershock in …
Tragic Deaths Underscore the World’s Worst Humanitarian Crisis
197 mostly Somali migrants died when their overladen boat capsized in the Red Sea. Escaping a world desperately short of water, they met their end by drowning.
That sad irony underscores the collective misfortune of those enveloped by the worst ongoing humanitarian crisis in the world: they were fleeing the parched Horn of Africa, …
The Ben Gurion Airport Protest: Picking the Wrong Line?
Of the many fruits born of the Arab Spring, is any more exotic than the protest unfolding at Israel’s Ben Gurion International Airport this week? In what Palestinian organizers describe as a kind of sidelong challenge to Israeli control of access to the occupied territories, activists are arriving at the airport, standing in line at …
India’s Top Outsourcing Firms Under Fire
Allegations of visa fraud have been a constant complaint by critics of the outsourcing industry, who say that firms misuse complex U.S. immigration laws to get their Indian employees to work in the United States. That’s the subject of the investigation underway now against Infosys. It started with an Alabama lawsuit filed in February …
World Refugee Day: Three Things You Must Know
Today marks 60 years since the founding of the UN refugee agency. Initially tasked with assisting 2.1 million Europeans displaced by World War II, it now works in 120 countries and is charged with helping millions more. In a cover story for TIME last year, Krista Mahr reported that the system is over-stretched and under-funded. The …
With Syria on Fire, Turkey and Israel Move to Avoid a New Fiasco at Sea
It’s hard to overstate the zesty potency of the words “Mavi Marmara” in Turkey. Giant posters on Istanbul’s busiest streets trumpet the impending return to sea of the ferry that Israeli commandos intercepted in the Mediterranean a year ago, killing nine activists en route to break the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip. The botched raid …
Four Decades Later, It’s Time to Scrap the Dead-End Drug War
I recently returned from the desert city of Durango, Mexico, where forensic officials are still trying to identify some 240 corpses discovered this year in mass graves. More than 200 other bodies have been found in similar fosas across northern Mexico. All were victims, many of them innocent victims, of the drug-trafficking …
Why Has Pakistan Targeted Informants Who Helped Track Bin Laden?
From TIME’s Islamabad contributor Omar Waraich.
In the days following the raid that discovered and killed Osama bin Laden, Pakistan’s top spymaster recalled that he had long made his feelings plain to his American allies. Where the two countries’ interests meet, Lieut. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha told a select group of journalists, there …
Refugee Case Highlights Global Plight of Ahmadi Muslims
Almost 100 Pakistani refugees, including dozens of children and a month-old infant, were freed from a Thai immigration prison on Monday, after a rights group put up a $150,000 bond for their release. The men, women and children, all members of Ahmadiya, a minority Muslim sect, were detained in police raids between December and …