MELBOURNE ― Thanks to Edward Snowden, I now know that the U.S. National Security Agency is spying on me. It uses Google, Facebook, Verizon, and other Internet and communications companies to collect vast amounts of digital information, no doubt including data about my emails, cellphone calls, and credit card usage.I am not a United States citizen, so it’s all perfectly legal. And, even if I were a U.S. citizen, it is possible that a lot of information about me would have been swept up anyway, th

Looking at the news from Washington a little more than a week ago, Americanophiles in Turkey were confused: Was the U.S. moving more toward openness and tolerance or back to more fundamentalism? Were Americans following Kemal Ataturk or Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan? The Supreme Court ruled, barely, for gay marriage with limits. The Senate cleared immigration reform amid warnings the measure would die in the House. Across the country, states were close to banning abortions. The picture isn

The Arab Spring has come full circle.Two years ago, huge crowds in Tahrir Square called for the removal of a military-backed dictator and for democratic elections. Today, opposition crowds in the same square are cheering the military’s ouster of an elected government. So much for the popular appeal of electoral democracy!Opposition groups lay the blame for Egypt’s ongoing economic and state collapse at the feet of ousted President Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood. The military has now p

PORTO ― The military coup that has overthrown Egypt’s first democratically elected president and led to the arrests of Muslim Brotherhood leaders across the country poses an enormous danger not only for Egypt’s democratic transition, but for the democratic hopes of the entire Arab world as well.The fact that the coup was undertaken with massive popular support is a sign of the enormous difficulties faced by the Muslim Brotherhood during its first turn in power. President Mohammed Morsi’s governm

Ever since former NSA contractor Edward Snowden fled the job he held for three months, taking four laptop computers full of U.S. intelligence with him to Hong Kong and Russia, other countries have become “outraged” by the Snowden disclosures about American intelligence practices. What, exactly, is so alarming? Apparently, the fact that spies actually spy. Give me a break.The average person might be excused for being surprised at what spies actually do, and by Snowden’s revelations about passive

Jobs are returning with depressing slowness, and most of the new jobs pay less than the jobs that were lost in the Great Recession.Economic determinists assume that globalization and technological advancement necessarily condemn a large portion of the American workforce to underemployment and stagnant wages, while rewarding those with the best educations and connections with ever higher wages and wealth.Many on the right of the political spectrum say we should accept this outcome because we must

Egypt has undergone a military coup, carefully choreographed and wrapped as a democratic act, but a coup d’etat nonetheless. How badly this ends will depend entirely on what the army and the Muslim Brotherhood do next. It’s true that this wasn’t an ordinary military seizure of power. The generals won’t, for example, be taking any formal political position; they acted on a wave of genuine popular anger at President Mohammed Morsi; and they set out a road map for new elections. They also lined up

The framers of the U.S. Constitution feared that democracy could devolve into rule of the mob. Events in Egypt are a reminder of why that concern was justified. Essentially the same pro-democracy activists who enabled Hosni Mubarak to be removed from power in February 2011 have now done the same to his democratically elected successor, Mohammed Morsi. In both cases it was the protesters who made the government vulnerable. And in both cases it was the army that delivered the coup de grace in the

On June 25, Texas State Senator Wendy Davis held an 11-hour filibuster that successfully delayed the passage of a new abortion regulation in the state. In order to block the bill that would close most of the abortion clinics in Texas and ban abortion for women over 20 weeks pregnant, she needed to keep talking on the rostrum until midnight when the legislature session ended. She was not allowed to drink, eat or have a toilet break. She could not sit or lean on anything or anyone. She had to stay

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s conservative stance on political reform has led to a major split within the princeling community, whose members share a common interest in preserving the ruling status of the Chinese Communist Party.Hu Dehua, the third son of the late party chief Hu Yaobang, openly criticized Xi at a seminar held by the liberal magazine Yan Huang Chunqiu in mid-April. It was by far the most severe criticism lodged against Xi since the latter became CCP general secretary last Novemb

At a time when the situation in East Asia has become increasingly unstable, cooperation between Japan and South Korea is becoming even more important. Both sides should step closer to each other to put bilateral relations back on a more normal footing.Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean Foreign Minister Yun Byung-se recently held talks in Brunei and agreed to stably develop a “future-oriented” bilateral relationship.These were the first such talks between Japanese and South Korean fo

In an age of an abrupt new openness after decades of repression, the line between freedom of speech and human rights is blurred in Myanmar, injecting a dangerous volatility into even commonplace incidents.“People cannot differentiate between freedom of speech and human rights. They think they can say what they like,” prominent monk Ashin Dhammapiya said at a conference on hate speech in Yangon last Friday.The government is also mulling over how to cope with a flood of chatter, propaganda and hat

In a new twist to the controversy over the 2007 inter-Korea summit transcript, the National Assembly has passed a bipartisan bill to request the perusal and disclosure of the document’s original version kept at the National Archives of Korea.Under the law on the management of presidential records, access to the document requires approval by at least two-thirds of the 300-member National Assembly. In a Tuesday vote, 257 lawmakers of the ruling and opposition parties supported the proposal.With th

The government has reaffirmed that it would implement without fail all regional development promises that President Park Geun-hye made during her election campaign last year.It is praiseworthy for the administration to try to follow up through the president’s campaign pledges. Yet the problem is that it simply lacks the required wherewithal.Finance Minister Hyun Oh-seok has reported to the ruling Saenuri Party that it would cost the government 124 trillion won to deliver on all of the 105 region

So here’s a question that’s nagging at me as we watch millions of Egyptians express their loathing for Mohammed Morsi, their hapless, power-grabbing president, and for his Muslim Brotherhood movement: How exactly did the U.S. come to be seen by Egyptian secularists and liberals as the handmaiden of a cultish fundamentalist political party whose motto includes this heartening sentiment: “Jihad is our way, and dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope?” I mean, how did the U.S. fail to formula

WASHINGTON ― “Authoritarianism in the name of Islam is dead,” messaged one Egyptian activist last Sunday, as millions gathered to denounce the rule of President Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood government. There’s a new wave of popular dissent this July 4th in Egypt, Iran and Turkey, the region’s three biggest Muslim democracies. Authoritarianism is still very much alive in the Middle East, but it’s under pressure from a surprisingly broad movement for change that defies religious or na

DUBLIN ― Both sides of the austerity debate that is now gripping economists and policymakers cite Ireland’s experience as evidence for their case. And, however much they try to position the country as a poster-child, neither side is able to convince the other. Yet this tug-of-war is important, because it illustrates the complex range of arguments that are in play. It also demonstrates why more conclusive economic policy making is proving so elusive.Here is a quick reminder of Ireland’s sad recen

Mohammed Morsi holds a singular distinction.As Egypt’s president, he is the world’s only democratically elected leader to motivate more than 20 million of his people, one-quarter of the population, to sign a petition calling for his ouster.Millions of these people began showing up at angry, sometimes violent demonstrations in Cairo and other cities on Sunday, the one-year anniversary of his rule. They’re irate about Morsi’s blatant leadership failures. Egypt is riven with enervating economic, po

NEW YORK ― Around the world, people’s understanding of why rape happens usually takes one of two forms. Either it is like lightning, striking some unlucky woman who was in the wrong place at the wrong time (an isolated, mysterious event, caused by some individual man’s sudden psychopathology), or it is “explained” by some seductive transgression by the victim (the wrong dress, a misplaced smile).But the idea of a “rape culture” ― a concept formulated by feminists in the 1970s as they developed t

In the run-up to Hong Kong’s return to China in 1997, the world wondered what officials in Beijing would do with the place. Would Hong Kong’s dynamism and openness catalyze change in China, or would the Communist Party try to remake the freewheeling city-state in its image? Sixteen years on, we know it’s more the latter than the former. Beijing has shackled Hong Kong with one bad, handpicked leader after another. China’s commissars and their local lackeys continue to push anti-sedition laws, pat