NEW YORK – One interpretation of the anti-government demonstrations now roiling Turkish cities is that they are a massive protest against po…

NEW YORK – Barring any unexpected new revelations, there is not much to be learned from the Tsarnaev brothers, better known as “the Boston b…

NEW YORK – Nobody would care much about North Korea – a small and isolated country of 24 million people, ruled by a grotesque dynasty that c…

NEW YORK – When too many Italians voted late last month for either a louche and discredited business tycoon or a comedian, European stock ma…

NEW YORK – Many people in the United Kingdom believe that their country can do perfectly well outside the European Union. Members of the UK …

NEW YORK – Human sexual behavior can be perilous, as the ghastly rape of a 23-year-old woman by six men on a Delhi bus in December once agai…

NEW YORK – Palestine is no longer an “entity,” but a state – or, to be precise, a non-member observer state of the United Nations, just like…

NEW YORK – Nothing concentrates the mind like a full-blown crisis. Like millions of other people in New York City, I heard Hurricane Sandy r…

NEW YORK – What is the point of a presidential debate? In the context of American presidential elections, “debate” is something of a misnome…

TOKYO – They don’t look like much, those few uninhabited rocks in the East China Sea between Okinawa and Taiwan, and a couple of tiny islets…

NEW YORK – The election of the United States’ next president is surely the most important contest in the democratic world. Yet the issues be…

NEW YORK – Some of the more hysterical German newspapers blamed Germany’s defeat against Italy in the semi-finals of the European championsh…

LONDON – Some fine ideas are rather like a beautiful object with a time bomb inside. The ideal of a unified Europe, though not designed to e…

NEW YORK – These are interesting times in China. A senior Communist Party official, Bo Xilai, is brought down – accused of offenses that inc…

NEW YORK – What possessed the young French Muslim Mohammed Merah to murder three Jewish schoolchildren, a rabbi, and three soldiers, two of …

NEW YORK – Rick Santorum, a former United States senator seeking the Republican Party’s nomination to challenge President Barack Obama this …

NEW YORK – The eccentric Bengali intellectual Nirad C. Chaudhuri once explained the end of the British Raj in India as a case of “funk,” or …

HO CHI MINH CITY – Can an entire people go mad? Sometimes it certainly seems so.Images of North Koreans in their hundreds of thousands howli…

NEW YORK – Were the Euroskeptics right after all? Was the dream of a unified Europe – inspired by fears of another European war, and sustain…

NEW YORK – Many would say that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi got what he deserved. Live by the sword, die by the sword.The Libyan tyrant happily a…

NEW YORK – On a rare foray outside his native Texas, Governor Rick Perry accused US President Barack Obama of “appeasement” towards the Pale…

NEW YORK – Many people still believe that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were not just acts of political terrorism, but part of a cultur…

NEW YORK – Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that Geert Wilders, the Dutch politician who is convinced that Europe is “in the final s…

AMSTERDAM – Most European citizens (for example, more than 60% in France and Germany) believe that Turkey should not become part of the Euro…

NEW YORK – Ratko Mladić is an easy man to hate. In his prime, he not only talked and behaved like a thug, but he also looked like one – the …