How Trump Schooled Xi In ‘Art Of The (Trade) Deal’
If you really want to understand President Trump’s trade policies, don’t read an economic text. Instead, you should read his 2004 bestseller, “The Art of the Deal.” Trump’s trade-negotiating tactics are straight from his book. Many people on both sides of the political spectrum have expressed …
Facebook and the Future of Online Privacy
Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, recently noted that the public scrutiny of Facebook is “very much overdue,” declaring that “it’s shocking to me that they didn’t have to answer more of these questions earlier on.” Leaders in the information technology sector, especially in Europe, have been w…
Macron offers to mediate talks between Syrian Kurds and Turkey
France has offered to mediate between Turkey and the Kurdish-dominated Syrian Democratic Forces, and assured the SDF of Paris’s support in stabilising northern Syria, President Emmanuel Macron’s office said on Thursday. Speaking after Macron met a delegation from northern Syria that included the Kur…
How to rig an election
Andrés Sepúlveda sleeps behind bombproof doors in a maximum-security prison in central Bogota, Colombia. When travelling to judicial hearings or to meet prosecutors, he is accompanied by a caravan of armed guards with serious firepower. As they move at high speed through the capital, the motorcade u…
John Bolton: Don’t Mention the Norms
John Bolton’s ascension to the post of US National Security Advisor feels all too inevitable. All soap operas need to refresh their cast now and again. Sometimes, it helps to bring in a well-established star to create a buzz and boost ratings. President Donald Trump was never likely to get through h…
Why is so much of the world’s coral dying?
Roughly a fifth of all coral in the world has died in the past three years. Some experts believe that there is now just half the amount of coral that was in the oceans 40 years ago. The northern third of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef has lost more than a third of its coral since 2015. Coral is neit…
Tabloid India
When the Bollywood superstar Sridevi Kapoor drowned last month, at age 54, in a bathtub in a Dubai hotel, coverage of her tragic death once again showcased all that is wrong with Indian media. Sridevi – who, after a 15-year hiatus, had made a spectacularly successful return to the silver screen in t…
Are Trump’s Moves a Springtime for Neoconservatism?
With his firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and appointment of the hawkish CIA director Mike Pompeo to replace him, Donald Trump has remained true to form. Chaos, not predictability, is what he promised during the campaign and it is what he is delivering, especially in foreign policy. The Br…
There’s a new secretary of state. Who cares?
Rex Tillerson’s sudden departure as secretary of state — alongside that of Gary Cohn last week as head of the National Economic Council — removes from the White House two of the only remaining pragmatists trusted by the rest of the world. With their departure, America’s credibility has taken another…
Moldova’s Conflict: Unfreezing, In a Good Way?
The word “frozen” is applied misleadingly to the series of half-dozen unresolved conflicts in the post-Soviet space. None of them are properly frozen, especially in eastern Ukraine and Nagorny Karabakh, where people continue to be killed. There was a literal deep freeze last week on both sides of th…