Briefing Archive

For a man known as a safe but unexciting pair of hands, Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda managed to make a splash this week with his unexpected announcement that he will step down as prime minister, less than a year into the job. On the face of it probably shouldn’t come as a surprise. With Fukuda’s approval ratings having plunged to the high 20s, a deadlocked Diet, 50 million lost pension records and controversial health insurance reforms, the prospects for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party were not exactly rosy ahead of a lower house election that has to be called […]

From Aug. 20-21, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad visited the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi at the invitation of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Assad last visited Russia in late 2006, when he met with then Russian President Vladimir Putin. At the beginning of their Sochi meeting, Medvedev greeted Assad by remarking that, “We are grateful to Syria for its support on issues related to the well-known recent conflict with Georgia, which committed an act of aggression against South Ossetia.” Assad responded that, “we wish to once again express our support for the Russian position as regards the recent conflict and […]

TORRÉON, Mexico — Fernando Martí, the 14-year-old son of a Mexican sporting goods magnate, was kidnapped in June, strangled within a few days of his abduction, and found in the trunk of a car in the nation’s capital in August. His ordeal — along with stratospheric levels of drug violence and the recent designation of Mexico as the country that leads the world in kidnappings — has provoked a groundswell of outrage across Mexican society. Politicians, civil groups, newspaper commentators, the business community — virtually everyone drawing breath from Tijuana to Cancun agrees that Mexico’s rampant criminality must be addressed. […]

Seen from space Saudi Arabia looks like a chunk of reddish clay chiseled from a vast slab linking the Arabian Gulf in the east to the Atlantic coast of Mauritania in the west. This desert-like landscape, stretching almost 5,000 miles across the Middle East, stands in stark relief to the green, fertile lands of Turkey and Europe to the north and the central African jungles of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo to the south. However, looking closer, from the perspective of an airplane flying over the kingdom, one would notice that the great sand sea of Saudi Arabia […]

At an emergency Sept. 1 meeting in Brussels, European Union leaders adopted the unexpectedly stern stance of threatening to suspend negotiations with Moscow on a renewed cooperative framework agreement unless Russian troops withdraw from Georgia. The decision was amplified by the drama of the gathering, which represented the first emergency session of the EU heads of government, formally known as the European Council, since the beginning of the 2003 Gulf War. According to the statement of the Extraordinary European Council, “Until troops have withdrawn to the positions held prior to 7 August,” when they first intervened in Georgia, “meetings on […]