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Left with no other allies, he turned to Singapore’s own people, who were immigrants like himself. Because they were so divided by what he called “the most hideous collection of dialects and languages,” he quickly concluded that, if full democracy were implemented, everyone would simply vote for their own ethnic group and overlook the common interests of the country.

Impressed by the economic growth enjoyed by Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and finally China, Lee began wondering if their common Confucian heritage was not the foundation of their success. He was soon propounding the Confucian virtues that came to be known as “Asian values”—family, diligence, filial piety, education and obedience to authority. He viewed these values as binding agents for developing countries that needed to find a way to maintain order during times of rapid change.

there was an irony in Lee’s latter-day conversion to Chinese traditionalism and Asian authoritarianism, especially in his insistence that they could serve as agents of modernization. After all, it was only a few decades earlier that reform-minded Chinese intellectuals (including Communists like Mao Zedong) had identified such Confucian “Asian values” as the very cause of their country’s backwardness and weakness, and then sought to extirpate them from Chinese thinking.

This year's El Niño weather event -- characterized by warming waters in the eastern Pacific Ocean -- is already one of the three strongest ever recorded.

As the weather goes wild across the globe, the aid agency Oxfam has warned that this El Niño could leave tens of millions of people exposed to disease and hunger.

"Millions of people in places like Ethiopia, Haiti and Papua New Guinea are already feeling the effects of drought and crop failure

How Great Britain and France secretly negotiated the Sykes-Picot Agreement

before the final outcome of the Great War has been determined, Great Britain, France, and Russia secretly discussed how they would carve up the Middle East into "spheres of influence" once World War I had ended.

 The Ottoman Empire had been in decline for centuries prior to the war, so the Allied Powers already had given some thought to how they would divide up the considerable spoils in the likely event they defeated the Turks

In 1993, Harvard professor Katherine Tate argued in her book From Protest to Politics: The New Black Voters in American Elections that Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential candidacies activated African Americans to identify and support leaders who could advance bla­­­­­­­ck America’s political aims through elected office. This was a marked shift from the Civil Rights era, when protest was the primary vehicle for enacting policy demands. Black voter participation rates and Obama’s elections are proof that Tate’s thesis was correct

Post-Obama, however, the allure of an elected official, even a black one, to effect change has worn off. Protest politics are returning to center stage.

To combat institutional lethargy, this wave of young people is employing a variety of tactics—from protest to pop culture—to influence the political agenda. They are the offspring of six decades of activism, growing voting power, and increased intra-racial class diversity

There is chaos in the French refugee camp that has come to be known as the Jungle. In an effort to dismantle the camp, riot police in Calais have directed bulldozers and fired tear gas and water cannons at the refugees, and some aid workers have been caught in the crossfire.

They came in very forcefully. They told the refugees they had one hour to leave their houses or they would be arrested. And the minute the refugees were out of the houses, they stepped in and begin demolishing them with axes and hand tools and carting all the remains away with bulldozers.

This camp has been around since March 2015. And originally, all the refugees were just living in tents. And over the last six months, we've had a massive project with volunteers from all over Europe coming in and building little shelters.

Raqqa, Syria -- ISIS's de facto capital city.

It's illegal to leave the so-called Islamic State.

Life in a warzone -- with fighter jets from Russia and the U.S.-led coalition dropping bombs on the ISIS heartland --

he Syrian government declared Saturday it is ready to attend peace talks scheduled in Geneva later this month

“terrorist groups” will be participating in the meetings, according to the Syrian news agency SANA.

The Geneva negotiations are the first step in a road map laid out last year by the international community to end the Syrian civil war. The

In Syrian Town Cut Off From the World, Glimpses of Deprivation

BEIRUT, Lebanon

The people of Madaya and neighboring Zabadani have tried, since the siege by pro-government forces began in July, to keep society functioning and adjust to their surreal new set of dynamics

An ISIS "massacre" and possible kidnapping in the eastern Syrian city of Deir al-Zor may have left hundreds of civilians and fighters dead, according to monitoring groups and Syrian state media.

Up to 400 civilians were kidnapped in an Islamic State attack on government-held neighborhoods in the city and taken to the countryside, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), a United Kingdom-based monitoring group. ...

New peace negotiations are set to begin on January 25 in Geneva, Switzerland, and January 20 meetings between Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov will include discussions to allow humanitarian aid to reach "beseiged and hard-to-reach places," according to a State department spokesperson. 

A deep new study of the American electorate, “Hidden Tribes,” concludes that two out of three Americans are far more practical than that narrative suggests. Most do not see their lives through a political lens, and when they have political views the views are far less rigid than those of the highly politically engaged, ideologically orthodox tribes.

The study, an effort to understand the forces that drive political polarization, surveyed a representative group of 8,000 Americans. The nonpartisan organization that did it, More in Common, paints a picture of a society that is far more disengaged — and despairing over divisions — than it is divided. At its heart is a vast and often overlooked political middle that feels forgotten in the vitrio

It calls that group the Exhausted Majority, a group that represented two-thirds of the survey.

Imagine what your own life would be like if you had no love in it, if you were just using people and being used. Trump, personifying the worst elements in our culture, is like a providentially sent gong meant to wake us up and direct us toward a better path.

his kind of life has an allure for other lonely people who also live under the illusion that you can win love and respect with bling and buzz. Michael Cohen was one of these people. He testified that in serving Donald Trump he felt he was serving a cause larger than self. Those causes were celebrity and wealth.

Getting arrested seems to have been a good education for Cohen. He now realizes that Trump will not provide him with the sustenance he needs

What’s behind all this good news?The most overarching explanation would be that the Enlightenment worked. The idea that if we — we being humanity — set ourselves the goal of improving well-being, if we try to figure out how the world works using reason and science, every once in a while we can succeed.

You have argued that there is such a thing as human nature. Do you think we can transcend it?Part of human nature allows us to control the other part of our human nature. Even though humans tend to be unreasonable, it can’t be the case that we’re incapable of reason — otherwise, you’d never be able to make the argument that we’re being unreasonable. Even if we tend to backslide to irrationality, that doesn’t mean we should indulge that when we are deliberating how to run a society.

I was surprised by how much interest there’s been from centrist politicians, who are desperate for a coherent narrative to defend centrist liberalism, cosmopolitanism, open society, from the threats both by populists and by the hard left. I think there is a hunger for a coherent worldview that isn’t just the status quo, the un-Trumpism. We can do better than that. We ought to use reason and science to enhance human well-being.

War in Yemen gives women more responsibility but not empowerment

It was an all-female gathering after a funeral for a family mourning their son, killed in Yemen's on-going civil war.

It's not just a fear for their lives or economic insecurity that has placed so many Yemeni women in this situation. It is also the lack of routine, such as children not knowing whether they can or should go to school, parents not knowing whether they have a source of income or how to put food on the table and sick people not having access to healthcare. The list of basic needs goes on.

Last autumn, we watched as Bashar al-Assad pummeled the life out of east Aleppo. His barrel bombs collapsed stone apartment buildings into concrete slabs, crushing their inhabitants between the layers. Those who survived were left with hunger, disease, and despair. Death surrounded them. With devastating detail, the siege taught us the full meaning of “kneel or starve,” the Syrian president’s strategy for defeating “the terrorists”—basically, anyone who opposed him. In mid-December, the Assad regime’s menacing green busses forcefully evacuated tens of thousands of civilians to Idlib, where local humanitarians scrambled to erect enough plastic tents for the families as snow began to fall.

By choosing to grieve in Arabic, we carved a semi-private space to mourn our homeland.

Back at home in my childhood bedroom, I finally cleared my desk of hundreds of plastic cassette boxes and swept them into trash bags. It was time to move on from the past. I thought of the tapes as an end of my youth and of outdated technology. I didn’t know it was just the beginning of the end of everything.

It is stunning to me, having been on the road with Barack Obama in the giddy, evanescent days of 2008, that he does not understand his own historic rise to power, how he defied impossible odds and gracefully leapt over obstacles.

He did it by sparking hope in many Americans — after all the deceptions and squandered blood and money of the Bush-Cheney era — that he was going to give people a better future, something honest and cool and modern.

He pushed aside his loyal vice president, who was considered an unguided missile, and backed a woman who had no economic message and who almost used the slogan, “Because It’s Her Turn.” Then he put his own reputation for rectitude at risk by pre-emptively exonerating Hillary Clinton on the email issue, infuriating federal agents who were still investigating the case.

When a student researching in the archives of a London museum read the unpublished memoirs of a suffragette bomber, she began to wonder if the history of the movement had been sanitised. The suffragettes may have won the vote for women, but some of them, she argues, were terrorists.

It was the fifth act of terror in the country in less than a year, and Riddell was anxious for more information. Combing through social media looking for real-time updates, she came across the image of a burning white plastic bucket.

Her first experience of prison came after she threw a brick through a Newcastle post office window, and, like an increasing number of jailed suffragettes, she went on hunger strike. The prison authorities dealt with these women by force-feeding them - violently pushing a tube into the nose or mouth. Marion protested against this first treatment by breaking a gas lamp and using mattress stuffing to set her cell on fire.

As of 2016, 91 percent of the city’s professional drivers were immigrants, many of whom hail from the world’s poorest countries. Half of all drivers of non-app-based for-hire vehicles, traditionally the most lucrative slice of the market, hail from the Dominican Republic. Almost a quarter of taxi drivers, meanwhile, are originally from Bangladesh.

n an interview with Vincent Barone of am New York, Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, insisted that something must be done about the resulting labor glut: “We now have a saturation of tens of thousands of workers, even after working 10-, 12-, 14-hour shifts, [who] are talking about hunger and poverty, and that’s not acceptable.”

Usually, the notion that new low-skill immigrants represent competition for those who already live among us is airily dismissed on the grounds that the labor market is dynamic, and so too are low-skill workers.

Reflecting on her academic year in Paris, she wrote in 1951: “I learned not to be ashamed of a real hunger for knowledge, something I had always tried to hide.”

“We showed Jacqueline things no one else could have shown her. Above all, we showed her the French way of life, the intellectual life, the artistic life, the charm of France.”

even here in Oklahoma, there's a growing hunger for accurate information on climate change: "I don't get the resistance I got at the beginning of my career because it's getting harder and harder to deny."

As they scooted out of the classroom on the first day of Lau’s two-day lesson, a few of the sixth-graders said this was the first they had heard of climate change. Others said they knew a little about it.

In teaching about climate change, Lau says she is fortunate to have support from her school’s administration. She has also learned how to choose her words carefully, especially given that so many people in the state (including members of her family) earn a living from carbon-intensive industries such as farming and oil and gas.

The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself.

A half-billion people already live in places turning into desert, and soil is being lost between 10 and 100 times faster than it is forming

“One of the important findings of our work is that there are a lot of actions that we can take now. They’re available to us,” Dr. Rosenzweig said. “But what some of these solutions do require is attention, financial support, enabling environments.”