Recent back-to-back visits to the United States by the top two leaders of Myanmar (better known as Burma) -- opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and current President Thein Sein -- have brought the Southeast Asian nation back into the international spotlight. They have also underscored the need for U.S. engagement as a bulwark against the economic uncertainty, ethnic tensions and civil unrest that continue to plague Burma's exceedingly fragile evolution.
You've got to feel a little sorry for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. With his nuclear brinksmanship and inflammatory public rhetoric, Iran's firebrand president is accustomed to hogging the international spotlight. But recent days have seen him making news for a different reason entirely. Ahmadinejad is now fighting for his political life against domestic opponents who blame him for the country's current fiscal crisis.
As the world evolves, presenting new challenges to U.S. national security, the patterns of U.S. foreign aid should evolve with it.
Nowhere is this truer than in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous and historically most influential state, which is gradually transforming itself from a Western-leaning secular autocracy into an increasingly Islamic state that's run by the anti-Western (specifically, anti-American) Muslim Brotherhood.
Quite suddenly, it seems, Iran’s economy is in serious trouble. In recent days, the country’s national currency has fallen to record lows against the U.S. dollar. On October 1st alone, the value of the Iranian rial declined by some 17 percent, collapsing to 34,700 to one American dollar. (It has since reportedly fallen still further). All told, the rial has lost more than 80 percent of its worth over the past year.
The troubling travails of Rimsha Masih, a Christian teenager who lives near Islamabad and is facing blasphemy charges for allegedly burning pages of the Koran to cook, reflects the growing intolerance toward religious minorities that amounts to what one expert calls a “gradual genocide” in Pakistan.