After visiting Tehran in 2013, I wrote that the Iranian capital seemed suspended somewhere between Pyongyang and Los Angeles. We’ve seen this past week how passionately Iranians want the latter, not the former -- as they denounced their impoverished garrison state and demanded a prosperous, modern future.Asking whether Iran’s demonstrations create a “pre-revolutionary” situation may miss the larger point. The process of change has already begun. The regime will use its instruments of repression,

The most recent World Trade Organization ministerial conference, held in December in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was a fiasco. Despite a limited agenda, the participants were unable to produce a joint statement. But not everyone was disappointed by that outcome: China maintained a diplomatic silence, while the United States seemed to celebrate the meeting’s failure. This is bad news for Europe, which was virtually alone in expressing its discontent.It is often pointed out that, in the face of US Pr

At the 2014 World Cup soccer tournament in Brazil, the US midfielder Michael Bradley put up a statistic that wowed folks back home: He ran further than anyone else. Through three games, Bradley had covered a total of 23.4 miles, according to a micro-transmitter embedded in his cleat, while his team finished tops among nations in “work rate,” a simple measure of movement per minute otherwise known as running around.Commentators at the New York Times, US News, and NBC Sports were duly impressed. L

In a country as repressive as Iran, it’s difficult to gauge where the current countrywide protests are leading. But a bold theory that predicted the recent transition to democracy in Tunisia may offer some clues.In 2008, US demographer Richard Cincotta predicted that Tunisia — then under a well-established authoritarian regime — would probably democratize before 2020 based on the age structure of its population. When Cincotta aired the forecast at a meeting of Middle East experts sponsored by th

This week, South Korea accepted North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s offer of “urgent” talks over his country’s participation in the 2018 Olympic Games in PyeongChang. Although the sudden engagement over what might amount to two figure skaters crossing the border may not seem like a big deal, history suggests that ignoring the entreaty could be a major missed opportunity.To understand the significance of these talks, it’s worth remembering the last time the Olympic Games were held on the Korean Pen

The 23rd Winter Olympics in PyeongChang are little more than a month away. We do not know yet what impact the world festival on snow and ice will have on this country, which is undergoing immense domestic and external woes. Financially, a balance sheet in red letters is very likely, but some magic outcome may not be too far-fetched when we recall what happened three decades ago. 　 We happily recall the excitement of watching the TV broadcast on the night of Sept. 30, 1981, when International Oly

The number of Chinese registered as suffering from depression, anxiety, alcohol abuse, dementia and other mental illnesses increased by 25 percent between 2014 and 2016, according to Chinese authorities. By one recent accounting, they number 173 million. Only 20 million receive professional treatment.Long-standing social stigmas and a lack of treatment options account for most of the gap. But those biases and institutional weaknesses are starting to break down. This week, Wenzhou Kangning, a cha