Foreign Policy

The news coming out of Sudan grows bleaker by the hour. Prospects for peace look less likely now than at any point since the north-south civil war, Africa's longest-running conflict, ended in 2005.

The vast majority of global health problems do not consist so much of finding a cure as delivering one. Improving health in the world's poorest countries requires solutions that are cheap and simple to administer -- and the good news is that these are increasingly available.

For three days each June, all of China quiets to a whisper. In Shanghai, the ever-present construction crews are furloughed, and thousands of uniformed signal guards are deployed to stop drivers from sounding their horns. Similar noise-reduction campaigns are put in place in other cities across the country.

But the New America Foundation's similar dataset, complied by analysts Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann, shows drastically different results. They too rely on news reports, but they estimate the civilian fatality rate to be only 32 percent relative ...

To most observers witnessing events in Syria, the goal is clear-cut: End the killing, support democracy, and change the Assad regime - hoping it will be removed or reformed to an unrecognizable degree. State actors looking at the same reality will often bring a different set of considerations into play, especially if they happen to be neighboring on Syria. Israel has had a complicated relationship with the popular upheaval in its northern neighbor - and, indeed, with the Ba'athist Damascus regime in general over the years.

In glittering Shanghai, known for its hopping night life and influx of Western luxury stores, a VIP cocktail reception last Thursday night, May 26,marked the opening of a new H&M clothing store on upscale Nanjing Road. As a parade of BMWs, Audis, and Mercedes pulled up to valet parking alongside a red carpet unfurled on the sidewalk, an observer might never have suspected that the local government here in China's richest and most urbane city has been struggling with two very basic problems: keeping the water running and the power on.

A unity agreement signed this week in Cairo between Palestinian political factions marks the first time in 4 years that a Palestinian government will be unified across the West Bank and Gaza (hitherto the territories were split between governments led by Fatah in the former and Hamas in the latter).

"I heard a plane way up high and then 'Doom!', the sound of a bomb hitting the ground," explained Mary Ajiang Kur, 37. "My neighbor called out: 'The Arabs are coming!'" recalled Kur, who said she grabbed her children and hid in the bushes.

Soon after, men arrived in her village, outside of Abyei town, the heart of a fertile, 4,000-square-mile area that straddles the provisional border between north and south Sudan.

It is impossible to write a political obituary of someone who not only hasn't yet passed away, but whose influence will assuredly live on long after he passes from the scene. This is especially the case with Lee Kuan Yew: founding father, prime minister, and until this week, "minister mentor" of the world's most admired city-state, Singapore.

Acolytes of Thomas Malthus -- the prudish 18th-century parson whose influence has considerably outlasted the accuracy of his predictions -- are generally predisposed toward gloom-and-doom, but their hand-wringing has been especially intense the past several weeks. With its latest population forecasts predicting the world population may surpass 10 billion people by the end of the century, the United Nations has stoked age-old fears that the planet may not be able to sustain all of the human beings trying to live on it.