Nearing the end of life, for artists, intellectuals and politicians their last hurrah carries a very specific style.  The late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, was not a natural bedfellow for Arsene Wenger, the French football manager in the English Premier League. However, the very first...

After 70 years of independence, India is finally making headway against Pakistan in its proxy war on Kashmir. Kashmir is approaching an inflection point. The tide is turning with the relentless targeting of insurgents by Indian security forces. It is not merely the numbers that are impressive with...

Fifteen decades after abolishing slavery, a non-contrite America is still a slave to its racist past. It is 152 years since the bloody civil war that tore America apart ended and slavery officially abolished. While blacks are no longer slaves today, are they truly free? In a country where all are...

Is Donald Trump pushing for a series of soft coups in the Gulf? After King Abdullah died in 2015, King Salman ascended to the throne in Saudi Arabia. This was the start of serious changes in the game of thrones for the Saud family. King Salman reformulated the structure of power through a series...

Both the freedom to practice religion and the right against noise pollution are protected by the Constitution of India. While I was traveling to my hometown in July, I got stuck in a massive traffic jam caused by kanwariya — the devotees of the god Shiva. Not only did the yatra (religious...

Under the premise that Pearl Harbor has been a grave miscalculation, we find similarities between 1940 and what is happening with North Korea today. The parallels between the pre-World War II US foreign policy in Japan and what we are observing now in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea...

The social, political and economic turmoil in the Kurdistan region reflects the crises in its educational system. On July 2, at a school in Iraqi Kurdistan, a 12th grade student, unable to hold it any longer, urinated himself during a baccalaureate exam. “I asked the invigilators and the teachers...

US Congress isn’t “stepping up” on foreign policy so much as sticking to a decades-old policy status quo. President Donald Trump just signed into law a bill reinforcing sanctions on Russia. And, for a brief time, Congress seemed ready to revisit the Authorization for Use of Military Force...