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Latest world news analysis on environment, global change, international security, science, women/female entrepreneurship & youth empowerment in the Middle East.
The 22nd FIFA World Cup in 2022 will be hosted by Qatar, meaning that for the first time in history the international association football bonanza will be held in the Arab world. Football aficionados are waiting to see how a Muslim-majority country that beat the United States as host will deliver...
Classic textbooks teach us that economic shocks typically hit either the demand or the supply sides of the economy. They usually stem from domestic developments, but sometimes they emerge from abroad. COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has...
Sweden has dealt with the global COVID-19 pandemic very differently from the other Nordic countries. All but Sweden are led by women. The female prime ministers in Denmark, Norway and Finland closed down their countries in the middle of March and have dealt with the pandemic in an open, inclusive...
On April 6, it was reported that the Commission on Human Rights was calling for stronger measures to tackle the increased rates of domestic violence incidents in the Philippines due to the lockdown measures that were implemented on March 16. The quarantine is worsening the problem of...
Indonesia has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. At the time of publishing, there have been more than 19,000 confirmed cases and over 1,200 deaths. Due to a lack of testing — just 776 people per 1 million in a country with a population of 268 million — the number of infections is...
Last October, a group of eight Apache attack and CH-47 Chinook helicopters carrying US commandos roared out of an airfield in Iraq. They raced through Turkish airspace and across the Syrian border, coming in low as they approached a village just north of Idlib province where Islamic...
You don't have to be within an eyeshot of the great plains to know about the “culling” of the herd. Where I grew up, near a small farm in New England, we kids knew all about “culling.” Across the road, on the far side of the cornfield, near the tree line, there would be a...
There are many theories as to how COVID-19 began. Some of them are plausible, others are nonsensical. US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have done their bit to fan such theories. Many in the world believe that the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was either released...
Since the beginning of 2020, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s popularity has dropped to its lowest point in 14 years. From February to March, Putin’s favorability dropped from 69% to 63%, and his disapproval ratings rose from 30% to 36%. While the Russian president continues to have a net...
In 2017, US President Donald Trump’s new administration found itself in a quandary. Should it continue providing weapons for use in Saudi Arabia’s murderous war in Yemen that had been raging for two years? In June 2017, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman unexpectedly declared neighboring...
India has an abysmally low percentage of people with access to decent health care. About 300 million Indian citizens live below the poverty line and, for them, medicine is prohibitively expensive. For decades, serious medical conditions have pushed families into poverty and destitution. From 2000...
