This article by Nate Silver, a well known economics blogger for the New York Times, takes an interesting stance on the Tucson assassination. He looks at it from a data analysis perspective and looks at the history of political assassinations in the U.S. He comes to the conclusion that there not enough data is released by the government about domestic terrorism to make any conclusions, but some of the statistics he presents are still interesting and good discussion points.

This article cites a few surveys taken since President Obama took office. It is interesting to look at this in comparison to the article we read from 2006 about Chavez and his disapproval of the Bush administration.

Medvedev fired the mayor of Moscow after Yuri Luzhkov said that Medvedev was leading the country back to Stalinism, even though Medvedev claims to have never seen/heard that statement. The article brings up interesting points about the corruption in Russia.

This article is about the growing strength of China. China is run by the Politburo, a 9 member committee. In 2010 there will be a new era of leaders on the Politburo because seven of the members will reach retirement age. No one knows yet if this transition will be smooth or who will take over as the next Premier. Another interesting thing to note is that there are many divisions within the communist party.

This article is about the importance of Germany to the EU and the relationship between East Germany and the EU. The article makes the point that East Germans did not have to gain acceptance to the EU, but rather when East and West Germany came together, they were automatically accepted whereas other former Soviet-block countries had to work hard for membership and they had to become more "European" in a pragmatic sense.

Here is a link to the EU Channel at the BBC. Because it comes from Europe, the perspectives are sometimes different from the other american sources.

This article talks about the next eight countries trying to gain entry into the EU. The most likely country to join the EU is Croatia and they may be approved as early as 2011. Each of the countries that applied as some internal issues they have to work out before they will be admitted. The process of being admitted is interesting to me because the countries first have to submit and application, get confirmed as a candidate, and then they begin talks. In the case of Turkey, the process has been going on since 1987.

This is a funny representation of how Americans view Europe. I think that there are definitely parts of it that are fairly accurate. What parts do you think are accurate? What does it tell you about stereotypes?

The political stalemate is coming to a close in Iraq as al-Maliki was selected by the Shiite alliance to be the Prime Minister. Now the government must split up jobs within the broad based unity governmetn. Allawi lost because of the sectarian dynamics in Iraq.

This article presents an interesting perspective on the role NATO may play in the future. The author predicts that NATO alliance may erode in upcoming years.

I read the introduction to this book on google books. It provides an interesting overview to how the Pakistani government functions and the threat of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal and proliferation.