Section: US & Canada
Ukrainian Parties Fail To Form New Governing Coalition
Last-minute demands raised by former Ukrainian President Yulia Tymoshenko’s Fatherland party quashed hopes for a new governing coalition in Ukraine on March 29. …read more Source: Radio Free Europe / Radio...
Latvia Blocks Russian Sputnik Site As Kremlin ‘Propaganda Tool’
Latvian authorities shut down Russia’s pro-Kremlin news site Sputnik on March 29, calling it a “propaganda tool” and drawing an immediate rebuke from Moscow. …read more Source: Radio Free Europe / Radio...
In Praise of Political Reporters
Yuri Gripas / Reuters Last night, President Obama gave the keynote lecture at an annual dinner to honor excellence in political reporting. The dinner is held once a year to commemorate Robin Toner, a legendary reporter who covered domestic politics for The New York Times until her death in 2008. (Obama recounted one of the anecdotes that has...
Why Estonia’s Future Matters to the US
I recently stood on the Estonian-Russian border. It was freezing cold and snowing lightly. Looking south along the Narva River I could see the Estonian city of Narva on the right and the Russian city of Ivangorod on the left. I was standing on Freedom’s frontier. This river, maybe 100 yards across, is the dividing line between a free and...
Political Stability in the Balance as Ukraine Ousts Top Prosecutor
Viktor Shokin had been widely criticized for turning a blind eye to corrupt practices, but observers of Ukrainian politics said he had played an important role in balancing competing interests. …read more Source: The New York...
Armenian President’s U.S. Visit to Include Meaty Topics Such as Proliferation
Image: Armenia. Stock Photo. Pixabay.com Armenian President Serzh Sargsyan is spending three days in the Boston area, home to one of America’s oldest ethnic-Armenian communities, before taking part in a nuclear summit in Washington on Thursday. Sargsyan, who arrived in Boston on Monday, is attending Armenian-community events and visiting...
The Humanization of Crime
At first we had the “globalisation of balkanisation,” when balkan-style failed-state wars became global after September 11. The modern trend, though, is the “balkanisation of globalisation.” The failed world order gets divided up by barbed wire into mentally gated communities, due to economic failure, floods of refugees...
The Sacramental Laurus
I was reading to the kids the other night from Land of the Firebird: The Beauty of Old Russia, by Suzanne Massie. It’s a wonderfully written book. Here’s a passage that caught my eye. Christianity first came to Russia in 988, with the conversion of the Kievan Prince Vladimir to Orthodoxy. In this passage, Massie explains how the Slavs...
Saving the South China Sea Without Starting World War III
Van Jackson Security, Asia Washington must boost Asian nations’ reconnaissance. Greater operational transparency in the South China Sea has become a strategic imperative, and the United States needs to treat it as such by investing greater resources and political capital toward increasing the shared maritime awareness of Southeast Asian...
Ghosts of Babi Yar: A Visit to the Ravine Where Nazis Murdered 150,000
KYIV, Ukraine—Seventy-four years later, I reached up and broke off a small piece of a branch that was long and gray. It was bent in the strange, contorted ways it had blindly grown to look for light here at the cold bottom of the ravine, where the forest canopy above had turned the sunny spring day into dark winter’s night. The branch...
