Slavery’s Global Comeback

The leading demographic accounts of contemporary slavery project a global slave population of between 20 million and 30 million people. Most of these people are in sedentary forms of slavery, such as hereditary collateral-debt bondage. But about 20 percent have been unwittingly trafficked though the promise of opportunity by predators through varying combinations of deception […]

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South Korea Elects First Woman President

SOUTH KOREA has elected Park Geun-hye, a 60-year-old conservative, as president for the coming five years. The candidate is from the same party, the Saenuri party, as the incumbent, Lee Myung-bak. She is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the dictator who set South Korea on the path of break-neck development, seizing power in 1961 and […]

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Are the New Democracies Prodemocracy?

INDIA TODAY STANDS as the world’s largest democratic state, a nation of over a billion people that stitches together countless ethnic groups, castes, and languages. Indian officials long have boasted of their nation’s deep and founding commitment to democracy, a public emphasis that has only grown stronger as China and India increasingly become global competitors. You […]

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‘Little Hu’ Takes Over Party Post in China’s Guangdong Province

Hu Chunhua, the second-youngest member of the Communist Party’s new Politburo, was appointed party boss of Guangdong, the southern manufacturing hub that has China’s biggest provincial economy. Hu, 49, replaces Wang Yang, a fellow Politburo member whose new post hasn’t been announced, the Xinhua News Agency said yesterday. Wang appeared publicly earlier this month when […]

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Pew Charts The Global Religious Landscape

Worldwide, more than eight-in-ten people identify with a religious group. A comprehensive demographic study of more than 230 countries and territories conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life estimates that there are 5.8 billion religiously affiliated adults and children around the globe, representing 84% of the 2010 world population of […]

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More War Than Peace In Myanmar

Helicopter gunships hover in the sky above a battlefield. The constant sound of explosions and gunfire pierce the night for an estimated 100,000 refugees and internally displaced people. Military hospitals are full of wounded government soldiers, while bridges, communication lines and other crucial infrastructure lie in war-torn ruins. The images and sounds on the ground […]

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Zuma And Mangaung

South African politics have been on a collision course toward Mangaung all year. The African National Congress is holding its National Conference in Mangaung, (the metropolitan region that includes Bloemfontein) this week and all of the political intrigue of the last few years will come to a head. Indeed, one can draw a straight line from the […]

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Brother’s Keepers

Mysteries have surrounded the Muslim Brotherhood since its founding, in 1928. Nobody knows how many members there are, or how much money the organization receives, or where it all comes from. The chain of command is murky; the goals and the guiding philosophy are not clearly stated. The Egyptian revolution, which has rolled and lurched […]

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