YANGON ― Here in Myanmar (Burma), where political change has been numbingly slow for a half-century, a new leadership is trying to embrace rapid transition from within. The government has freed political prisoners, held elections (with more on the way), begun economic reform, and is intensively courting foreign investment.Understandably, the international community, which has long punished Myanmar’s authoritarian regime with sanctions, remains cautious. Reforms are being introduced so fast that

VIENNA ― Nuclear power has become safer since the devastating accident one year ago at Fukushima, Japan. It will become safer still in the coming years, provided that governments, plant operators, and regulators do not drop their guard.The accident at Fukushima resulted from an earthquake and tsunami of unprecedented severity. But, as the Japanese authorities have acknowledged, human and organizational failings played an important part, too.For example, Japan’s nuclear regulatory authority was n

WASHINGTON ― After several years of a passionate but star-crossed courtship, the U.S. and Pakistan seem to be trying something different: A calmer, quieter relationship with lower expectations, greater distance and fewer feuds. The two countries, in effect, have taken a step back from their intense partnership and moved toward a more pragmatic framework. If this were a marriage, you wouldn’t speak of a divorce, or even a separation, but of a cooling off ― with each side happy to have a bit more

Two days at the recent Conference on Greening Urban Growth in Penang allowed me to catch up on the latest thinking about the environmental impact of urban development. The impact of industrial pollution is with us every day, with daily smog, contaminated water and coughs and colds that don’t go away. In 2011, the population of the world reached 7 billion. It took 5,000 years for man to reach 20 million, but by 1800 it became 1 billion. In 1950, it was only 2.5 billion, which meant that in my lif

MADRID ― The English author and priest William Ralph Inge once said that “A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he cannot sit on it.” Syria’s Assad dynasty, however, seems to believe that it can defy that dictum. Historically, few autocrats have understood that change produced peacefully by government is the most viable conservative solution to popular demands, and the best way to avoid violent revolution. This is the wisdom that Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, Libya’s Muammar el-Qaddafi, Tun