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n the international arena, the new president, Dilma Roussef, has pulled back from Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva's many excesses (indifference to human rights abuses, support for Iran and its nuclear program, and rhetorical anti-Americanism) during his last year in office, and may even have a present for Obama.

South America is booming, as India and China swallow up its exports of iron, copper, soybeans, coffee, coal, oil, wheat, poultry, beef, and sugar. Its foreign trade and investment patterns are diversified and dynamic. With a few minor exceptions, migration is internal to the region, and a modus vivendi has been reached with the drug trade, mainly coca leaf and cocaine in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. Moreover, relations with the US, while important, are no longer paramount. South American governments can afford to disagree with the US, and often do. They have just elected a new president of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), whose headquarters are being built in Quito, Ecuador. As its name suggests, Unasur's main raison d'être is to exclude Canada, the US, and Mexico (in contrast to the Organisation of American States).

None of this holds true for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean islands – mainly the Dominican Republic, but eventually Cuba, too, and, in its own way, Haiti. These are not mineral-rich or bountiful agricultural nations: some coffee and bananas here, a little sugar and beef there, but nothing with which to sustain a boom. While Mexico is America's second-largest supplier of oil, this represents only 9 per cent of its total exports. Instead, these countries export low-value-added manufactured goods (Mexico does more, of course), and live off remittances, tourism, and drug-transshipment profits. All of this is overwhelmingly concentrated on the US: that is where the migrants are, where the towels and pajamas are shipped, where the tourists come from, and where the drugs are bought. For these countries, including Mexico, stable, close, and productive relations with America are essential.

In 2010, with Greece crippled by debt and threatening the survival of the euro, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank began imposing German-inspired austerity on the country. The aim was to slash the budget deficit and address fundamental problems like corruption and a failure to collect taxes. Such policies, they promised, would get Greece back on its feet, able to borrow again on financial markets.

Greeks grudgingly went along, assured that painful reform would return the country to growth by 2012. Instead, Greece lost 400,000 jobs that year and continued on a decline that would see a drop in the gross domestic product since 2008 not much different from the one experienced during the first five years of the United States’ Great Depression.

Greece’s unemployment rate was supposed to top out at 15 percent in 2012, according to International Monetary Fund calculations. But it roared to 25 percent that year, reached 27 percent in 2013 and has ticked downward only slightly since.

President Obama said that he and other world leaders have offered Iran an “extraordinarily reasonable deal” that will test whether the leadership of the Islamic nation is serious about at last resolving the dispute over its nuclear program.

over the next month or so, we’re going to be able to determine whether or not their system is able to accept what would be an extraordinarily reasonable deal

The negotiators have been talking about an agreement that would limit Iran’s capacity to enrich uranium to the point that, in theory, it would take it a year to “break out” and create enough fuel for a bomb if it violated the terms, to be verified by international inspectors.

Indyk somehow retains hope for a peace deal. For all the stasis and backsliding over the past two decades, he argues that the Palestinians have made some strides over the years. Instead of rejecting Israel, they've accepted its right to exist. Instead of practicing terrorism, Abbas's Fatah party has embraced non-violence. Palestinian officials have come to terms with acquiring a demilitarized state encompassing only 22 percent of historic Palestine as part of a two-state solution.

On the Israeli side, Indyk added, annexing the West Bank and its 2.5 million Palestinian Arabs, as some Israelis on the right are calling for, is antithetical to Israel functioning as a democratic, Jewish state. If it remains democratic under this scenario, then the Palestinians will constitute a majority of the population. If it remains Jewish, then the Palestinians will be stripped of their rights.

But then, beginning in mid-February, Abbas suddenly "shut down." By the time the Palestinian leader visited Obama in Washington in March, he "had checked out of the negotiations," repeatedly telling U.S. officials that he would "study" their proposals, Indyk said. Abbas later signed 15 international conventions and struck a unity deal with the Gaza-based militant group Hamas. These moves deflated the peace process.

A new class of astronauts is being sought by Nasa, now that a return to crewed missions from American soil is on the horizon.

The US space agency said it would accept applications for its astronaut corps from 14 December to mid-February 2016 and announce the successful candidates in mid-2017.

Since the space shuttle was mothballed in 2011, the only way to get into space has been to secure a seat aboard the three-person Russian Soyuz capsule and fly from Baikonur in Kazakhstan. While the Soyuz will continue to ferry people to and from the International Space Station, other vessels are on course to take over some of the trips. Boeing and Elon Musk’s SpaceX are developing the CST-100 Starliner and Crew Dragon spacecraft, respectively. Meanwhile, Nasa is building the Orion deep space exploration vehicle.

A task force took two years and nearly $2 million to investigate more than 1,200 pieces found in a Munich apartment

German prosecutors sat on the information that they had confiscated some 1,200 pieces of art stolen by Nazis before World War II hidden in a Munich apartment in 2012, until the find was made public by a piece published in a German newsmagazine, Spiegel, in 2013.

In the wake of the outcry following the reveal, a task force spent two years and nearly $2 million on a project to return the stolen works to their rightful owners. Yet, so far, the provenance of only five artworks has been determined, Melissa Eddie writes for the New York Times.

U.N. Toughens Sanctions on North Korea in Response to Its Nuclear Program

Exasperated with North Korea’s defiant testing of nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, the United Nations Security Council voted unanimously on Wednesday to severely toughen its penalties against the isolated country.

The 15-member Council approved a draft resolution, negotiated for weeks by American and Chinese officials, that called for inspecting all cargo going in and out of the country, banning all weapons trade and expanding the list of individuals facing sanctions.

he Taliban said on Saturday that they would not participate in international peace talks, citing what they claimed were increased American airstrikes and Afghan government military operations.

The talks, convened by the United States, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan, were expected to start this month in Pakistan.

Afghan and Pakistani government officials said the talks would continue despite the Taliban statement, but pushed the start date back to sometime later this month.

ndia has denied visas to a team from the United States government responsible for monitoring religious freedom, the group said in a statement this week.

The organization, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, had planned a trip to India, scheduled to begin this week, to assess religious liberty in the country.

Robert P. George, the group’s chairman, said that the team was “deeply disappointed” by the Indian government’s action.

At a time when nationalist and far-right politics are again ascendant in Europe, a team of German historians presented a new, annotated edition of a symbolic text of that movement on Friday: “Mein Kampf,” by Adolf Hitler.

The Nazi leader’s manifesto, which first appeared as two volumes in 1925 and 1927, was banned in Germany by the Allies in 1945 and has not been officially published in the country since then. A team of scholars and historians spent three years preparing a nearly 2,000-page edition with about 3,500 annotations in anticipation of the expiration on Dec. 31 of a 70-year copyright held by the state of Bavaria.

The effort by the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich to publish the new, critical edition was the subject of debate almost as soon as it was announced, with some seeing it as an important step toward illuminating an unsavory era in Germany,

It’s become a predictable pattern: One act of violence in the world overshadows a similar, concurrent violent act, inviting a backlash against this imbalance in scrutiny, sympathy, and grief. But that predictability doesn’t make the pattern any less distressing. Each time there’s a major terror attack in an American or European city—New York, Madrid, London, Paris, Paris again—it captures the attention and concern of Americans and Europeans in a way that similar atrocities elsewhere don’t seem to do. Seldom do events line up so neatly, offering a clear comparison, as the bombings in Beirut and the rampage in Paris.

Onepotential explanation is simple: There were three times more deaths in Paris than in Beirut. Beyond that are a host of other, intertwined reasons. Perhaps chief among them is familiarity. Americans are much more likely to have been to Paris than to Beirut—or to Cairo, or to Nairobi, or to any number of cities that have experienced bloody attacks. If they haven’t traveled to the French capital themselves, they’ve likely seen a hundred movies and TV shows that take place there, and can reel off the names of landmarks. Paris in particular is a symbol of a sort of high culture.

There is also a troubling tribal, or racial, component to this familiarity factor as well: People tend to perk up when they see themselves in the victims.

Cambodian Human Rights Day events canceled amid state crackdown

cancel its annual International Human Rights Day events in the country's prisons for the first time in 20 years because of prohibitive conditions imposed by the government.

Nongovernmental organizations have come under increasing scrutiny in Cambodia after the country passed a law in July that requires all NGOs to report their activities and finances to the government

"The problem's not solved because of this accord, but make no mistake, the Paris agreement establishes the enduring framework the world needs to solve the climate crisis," the president said late Saturday in a speech from the White House's Cabinet Room. "It creates the mechanism, the architecture, for us to continually tackle this problem in an effective way."

But who benefits from the new "architecture" the accord creates? And what will the deal cost for others?

On its face, the plan agreed to on Saturday affects just about every nation. It requires countries to limit the rise in global average temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. It also sets an even more ambitious goal to slow the warming further -- down to just 1.5 degrees Celsius. (In the years since global industrialization, the world's temperature has already risen 1 degree Celsius.)

The Obama administration is locked in a sharp new debate over whether to deploy American military forces to establish no-fly zones and safe havens in Syria to protect civilians caught in its grinding civil war.

White House remains deeply skeptical about the idea, but the growing refugee crisis in Europe and Russia’s military intervention in Syria have increased pressure on President Obama

the fact that the administration is even revisiting an idea it has previously rejected — just weeks after Mr. Obama publicly dismissed it again

And if you think, as Amnesty International suggested recently, that the solution is to decriminalize the commercial sex trade around the world, then pay special heed.

Poonam thus became one of 20.9 million people worldwide — a quarter of them children — subjected to forced labor, according to the U.N.’s International Labor Organization. In the United States, tens of thousands of children are trafficked into the sex trade each year.

and Koirala says that Maiti Nepal has helped prosecute 800 people for involvement in trafficking. In America as well, we need to prosecute traffickers rather than their victims.

South Korea and Japan reached a landmark agreement on Monday to resolve their dispute over Korean women who were forced to serve as sex slaves for Japan’s Imperial Army.

The so-called comfort women have been the most painful legacy of Japan’s colonial rule of Korea, which lasted from 1910 until Japan’s defeat in 1945

“We are not craving for money,” said Lee Yong-soo, 88, one of the women. “What we demand is that Japan make official reparations for the crime it had committed.”

Deadliest Ebola Outbreak on Record Is Over, W.H.O. Says

DAKAR, Senegal — The World Health Organization declared on Thursday the end to the deadliest Ebola outbreak on record, which killed and sickened tens of thousands of people in West Africa, even as it cautioned that more flare-ups of the disease were likely.

recent chain of cases in Liberia was snuffed out, marking the first time since the start of the epidemic two years ago that Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel warned on Sunday that his nation would ensure that Tehran never obtains nuclear weapons, while also taking credit for keeping Iran from already having them.

Mr. Netanyahu has been an open and vocal opponent of the deal with Iran.

“Israel’s policy has been and will remain exactly what it has been: not to allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons.”

British Labour Leader Offers Compromise on Trident Program

Stirring a divisive internal debate over defense, Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of Britain’s opposition Labour Party, suggested on Sunday that he might support the continued existence of the country’s Trident submarine fleet if it were sent on patrol without carrying nuclear

warheads.