In The News

Guardian: Wealth of Our Collective Data

Chris Hughes April 28, 2018
Individuals constantly produce and share data. “We share all this data about ourselves because we like the services these companies provide, and business leaders tell us we must to make it possible for those services to be cheap or free,” explains Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder, for the Guardian. Shareholders of tech and other firms benefited, and the profits add incentives for less data...

New Statesman: No Serious Strategy for Syria

John Bew April 23, 2018
After seven years of civil war, Syria is in peril. UN peace efforts have flailed, and leaders of Iran, Turkey and Russia have met just before a chemical attack on Ghouta. The three countries do not agree on a role for Syria’s leader Bashar al-Assad, but are “are increasingly alienated from the West, have a substantive military presence on the ground within Syria, want to keep the Saudis and...

Korea Times: Talks Underway to End the Korean War

Kim Rahn April 18, 2018
A formal peace treaty will be the topic for two summits, one between North and South Korea in April and a later one with the United States and North Korea. “The two Koreas remain technically at war as the Korean War ended only with the armistice agreement,” reports Kim Rahn for the Korea Times. North Korea, China and the United Nations Command signed the armistice agreement that suspended...

AFP: Chemical Inspectors Enter Syria’s Douma

April 17, 2018
A team of investigators with the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons landed in Syria to examine the reported April 7 gas attack near Damascus, but delays block them from entering the neighborhood. The United States, France and Britain had already launched missile strikes on military sites. French President Emmanuel Macron admitted that missile strikes will do little in protecting...

New York Times: Attack in Syria, a World of Potential Risks

Ben Hubbard April 14, 2018
The United States, France and British launched airstrikes outside Damascus with the goal of reducing the Syria’s chemical weapons capacity. The strikes pose a “risk of drawing the United States even more deeply into a conflict in which Russia and Iran… have more invested than ever in keeping President Bashar al-Assad in power.” Russia called for an emergency UN Security Council meeting. Syria...

Times of India: Can Trump Charm Kim?

Nayan Chanda April 13, 2018
US President Donald Trump relies on global crises and foreign policy disruptions to distract from an ongoing investigation into Russian meddling with the 2016 US presidential election: tariff threats, US troop withdrawal from Syria and missile threats, dispatch of US troops to the Mexican border and notably a snap decision to meet with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. “All of these moves threaten to...

Wall Street Journal: Myanmar Court Holds Journalists Investigating Rohingya

Jon Emont April 11, 2018
Government leaders who engage in shameful behavior strive to limit press freedoms. A Myanmar court is holding two Reuter journalists for reporting on the Rohingya crisis. The minority Muslim group has no citizen rights in the Buddhist nation and the military burned villages and forced as many as 700,000 people to relocate to Bangladesh. “Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo had been investigating alleged...