By Alex Perry , Connie Agius , Newsweek It is a sunny morning in April 2015 on Sicily’s east coast and Mount Etna is a postcard, rising from a green-blue sea up through olive groves, orange orchards and steep hill towns to ascend a towering snowy cone ringed by cotton-wool clouds. But in the centre of this…
BY STEPHEN M. WALT, Foreign Policy It’s time to ponder a troubling possibility: What should we do if the Islamic State wins? By “wins,” I don’t mean it spreads like wildfire throughout the Muslim world, eventually establishing a caliphate from Baghdad to Rabat and beyond. That’s what its leaders say they are going to do, but…
By Rob Bricken, Gawker 1 Before Jesus arrived and his divine father chilled out, the Old Testament God was, ironically, kind of a hellraiser. He was not a nice guy. He really liked killing people. And he may have actually been insane, if his willingness to randomly murder devout worshippers like Moses was any indication. Here are…
By Adam Taylor , The Washington Post Eritrean President Isaias Afwerki listens as he meets with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir during his official visit in Khartoum, June 11, 2015. (REUTERS/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah) On Monday, the United Nations released the results of a year-long investigation into human rights in Eritrea. What it found was horrific. Detailing “systematic, widespread and…
By SERGEI GURIEV and DANIEL TREISMAN NY Times THE standard image of dictatorship is of a government sustained by violence. In 20th-century totalitarian systems, tyrants like Stalin, Hitler and Mao murdered millions in the name of outlandish ideologies. Strongmen like Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire left trails of blood. But in recent decades, a new…