The holiday season that is now upon us is a time for festivity, and usually of overeating. But the rampant consumption of sugar that marks t…

It is time for New Year's resolutions, and this year's are obvious. When the millennium opened, world leaders pledged to seek peace, the end…

This summer, friends who live a few kilometers from us in rural Montana in the western US had to interrupt their dinner when a black bear su…

For more than 50 years, Europeans have shared aspirations for closer economic cooperation and political ties. The accession of ten new count…

Certainly, the diversity of forms of governance used over the centuries by Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and Austria-Hungary when they ruled wh…

The deaths of Yasir Arafat and of Sheikh Zayd, the long-standing ruler of the United Arab Emirates, continues the generational change that b…

That Ukrainians will vote for their freedom this Christmas season is a coincidence of true perfection. For our movement is a triumph, not of…

Committee reports are usually deadly dull, and UN committee reports are among the dullest. But the recent report of the UN Secretary General…

Ukraine’s ‘Orange Revolution’ will reach its climax on December 26, when Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovich and former Prime Minister Viktor Y…

A perception has been growing over the last few years – and picking up strength in recent months – that Latin America is swinging back to th…

Homeowners around the world effectively gamble on home prices. Their risks today are often big due to real estate bubbles in such glamour ci…

Late last month, while putting the finishing touches on the next edition of our newspaper, Haykakan Zhamanak (The Armenian Times), we hear…

China and southern Africa have received growing international attention in recent years, but for very different reasons. As a rising, rapidl…

Reform, when long discussed but never implemented, can do far more harm than good. Anticipation of a reform – say, of pension rules, the hea…

The French Socialist Party may well have just saved ratification of the European Union’s draft Constitutional Treaty by France in next summe…

Developing countries are blessed with some of the world’s most precious natural resources. But that blessing can also be a curse – and not j…

Looking back over the turbulent year that is now coming to an end, one is tempted to focus on what American leaders have come to call the Gr…

To divide a people in order to conquer them is an immoral strategy that has endured throughout recorded history. From Alexander the Great to…

Protests in China are nothing new. By some accounts, Chinese officials currently negotiate upwards of 50,000 “major incidents” annually. Wid…

Almost all of the world’s developed countries consider themselves, and are, social democracies: mixed economies with very large governments …

The moment of truth has come. The European Union must decide on December 17 whether to open accession talks with Turkey. Is today’s Union pr…

The People’s Bank of China and the Bank of Japan – as well as other central banks in Asia – are in trouble. They have accumulated vast forei…

Japan’s government and National Security Council plan to revise the country’s National Defense Program Outline (NDPO) by the end of this yea…

Recently I visited Moscow after five years away. The city, which looked different and strange, impressed me by its ability to change. My day…

The European Union, after a three-year spat with President Bush, is keen to be regarded as a world player to be reckoned with. Many EU leade…