BRUSSELS – The recent abductions of Syriac Orthodox Archbishop Yohanna Ibrahim and his Greek Orthodox counterpart, Paul Yazigi, reflect not …

PARIS – “If the law supposes that,” says Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist, “the law is a ass – a idiot.” For decades, Britain’s libel laws had bee…

PRAGUE – Two years have passed since Myanmar (Burma) held its first general election after more than two decades of military dictatorship. T…

NEW DELHI – Last December’s fatal gang rape of a 23-year-old woman in New Delhi triggered an unprecedented public outcry in India. Tens of t…

SHANGHAI – Since Xi Jinping was anointed as China’s new president, reports of official repression of dissent have hardly abated. But, while …

PARIS – According to two pro-government newspapers in Turkey, Star and Yeni Akit, as well as Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan himself, th…

SEATTLE – The lives of the world’s poorest people have improved more rapidly in the last 15 years than ever before, yet I am optimistic that…

ATHENS – On Valentine’s Day, countless couples will celebrate romance by candlelight. On the same day, one billion women and men worldwide w…

BUDAPEST – A year and a half has passed since the European Commission adopted the EU Framework for National Roma Integration Strategies up t…

TORONTO – This is a decisive moment for sight-impaired people like me: men and women who are seeking to expand our minds and to contribute t…

WASHINGTON, DC – Throughout history, mistreatment of minorities – whether ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural, regional, ideological, se…

LONDON – In the coming days and weeks, critics will try to minimize what voters in the US states of Colorado and Washington accomplished by …

BRUSSELS – “Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come,” the American poet Carl Sandburg wrote hopefully in 1936. His sentiment seems …

ISLAMABAD – The men who attempted to kill 14-year-old Malala Yousafzai on October 9 knew what she represented. Her active involvement since …

GENEVA – Every year, more than 200 million people are affected by natural disasters. Many will bear the brunt of recurring floods, storms, o…

NEW YORK – As Syria has descended into all-out civil war, much of the worsening slaughter has been attributable to aerial bombardments of ur…

PARIS – Violent attacks on US diplomatic outposts across North Africa and the Middle East have once again raised the question of how to resp…

CAIRO – This summer, as the dust of the Arab Spring revolutions begins to settle, women – who stood shoulder to shoulder with men in defying…

HEIDELBERG – Rarely does one read such hopeful news: in late June, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) acqu…

NEW YORK – When graffiti appeared last spring on a wall near Tunisia’s interior ministry reading “Thank you, Facebook,” it was not just prai…

STOCKHOLM – Julian Assange’s bizarre bid for political asylum in Ecuador’s embassy in London has claimed headlines everywhere, but it has ob…

NEW YORK – Western media describe my friend and colleague Chen Guangcheng as a blind activist who made a flight to freedom when China allowe…

PHILADELPHIA – A last-minute deal between the United States and China may afford human-rights lawyer and activist Chen Guangcheng the opport…

BRUSSELS – Vladimir Putin’s return to the Kremlin as Russia’s president was always a foregone conclusion. But, when he is sworn in on May 7,…

SOFIA – At a time when the ongoing European debt crisis is fracturing public faith in the continent’s political and economic institutions, o…