Supreme Leader

At the Fourth Summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA) that opens May 20 in Shanghai, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani will meet with both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Among other things, the summit will underscore how rising non-Western powers are ...

Earlier this month, Saudi liberal activist Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1,000 lashes, 10 years in prison and a heavy fine for insulting Islam. In fact, his crime was to establish an online discussion forum where people were free to speak about religion and criticise religious scholars. He had been charged with “apostasy” in 2012, because ...

In what is perhaps the central myth of the Cold War, President John F. Kennedy is said to have stared down Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis and refused to give an inch, forcing the Soviet premier to capitulate to his steely will and America’s superior military might. As Leslie Gelb, president ...

Why do we ­tolerate the threat of ­another world war in our name? Why do we allow lies that justify this risk? The scale of our ­indoctrination, wrote Harold Pinter, is a “brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of ­hypnosis”, as if the truth “never happened even while it was happening”. Every ...

The emergence of terrorist group Boko Haram, after its deadly attacks and merciless kidnapping of nearly 300 Nigerian girls from a boarding school, has brought it to the fore of the headlines and along with it raised dozens of questions over the corrupt political system in Nigeria. It just so ...

Foreign policy is a critical component in the lives, conduct, and governance of all nation-states. But it has become even more significant in recent years as interstate relations have grown ever more complex. The inexorable rise in the number of international players — including multilateral organizations, nonstate actors, and even ...

Today my four years at the Lebanese American University were summed up with a one-hour event hosting the American ambassador in Lebanon, David Hale. As I was sitting in the event questions were going backward and forward about how the US will carry out the tasks on its agenda in ...

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Wednesday that religious organizations are largely exempt from anti-discrimination lawsin their hiring and firing decisions. For those who are thinking of getting into the God business, which religion offers its clergy the best pay? Judaism. The American Jewish newspaper Forward conducted a survey in 2010 ...

When Raphael Lemkin coined the term ‘genocide’ in 1944,  he would have been hoping against hope that it would not have to be used to describe any events in the future. Mankind had witnessed the horrors of Herero, Zulu, Assyrian, Kurd and the more documented Congolese and Armenian genocides, in ...

Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of the core group of al-Qa’ida, may well chortle in disbelief if he reads a translation of Tony Blair’s latest speech on the Middle East delivered last week. If Blair’s thoughts are used as a guide to action, then the main beneficiaries will be al-Qa’ida-type jihadist ...