The Arab Spring may seem like a distant memory, but a new report by a team of Arab and American analysts argues that across the Middle East people still feel the same yearning for better governance and rule of law that motivated protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.The persistence of this vision of more modern and just government is important to remember, especially at a time when the Trump administration is so focused on the threatening image of Islamist extremism. The study is a reminder that m

In the weeks since Donald Trump’s inauguration as president of the United States, it has become clear that he intends to roll back the progressive-egalitarian agenda that is commonly associated with “political correctness” to the starting block -- not just in the United States, but globally. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s White House Svengali and former CEO of the extreme right Breitbart News, has long pursued this ideological project, and we now know that what he or Trump says must be taken both serio

Of all the measures to improve gun safety, background checks are among the most reasonable and popular. House Republicans lost no time this week in voting to weaken them.　A bill approved on a mostly party-line vote in the House would rescind a rule on gun background checks that was initiated by the Barack Obama administration in 2012 and finalized in December. President Donald Trump is expected to sign the bill after its likely passage by the Senate.　The rule requires the Social Security Adminis

Donald Trump’s recent flurry of executive orders mandates that for every new regulation issued by any agency, two must be eliminated. This comes on top of a federal hiring freeze and vows to reduce administrative bloat and otherwise force the government bureaucracy to conform to the kinds of expectations that govern private business.While Trump sees himself as an outsider president bringing new ideas to Washington, these particular ideas would be painfully familiar to his predecessors. For the p

America has fixed coordinates for the geography of the Islamic State, the West’s deadliest terror threat. There’s Mosul, now in the midst of a US-backed bid by the Iraqi military to eradicate Islamic State militants from the northern Iraqi city. There’s also North Africa and northern Syria, where the Islamic State inflicts its barbarism on Syrian civilians and blueprints attacks on the West.But there’s another part of the world where Islamic State is rising, a region few Westerners know: Deadly

President Donald Trump seems determined to start a fight with China over trade. He’s appointed notable China skeptics to his economic team, badgered companies like Apple Inc. to stop making products on the mainland, and threatened tariffs of 45 percent on Chinese goods.He hopes to get companies to move their manufacturing operations back home and create jobs in American factories. It won’t work. In fact, it’s likely to hurt the very voters he’s promised to protect.China’s factories now compete l

At a meeting with small-business leaders last week, President Donald Trump pledged to do “a big number” on the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which he blamed for cutting off the bank lending needed for growth. “It’s almost impossible now to start a small business and it’s virtually impossible to expand your existing business,” he said.　Trump is wrong about small-business starts. Since early 2010, new business creation has rebounded.　But he’s right, albeit with a whiff of exaggeration, that it’s harder to

Democrats trust only Democratic-approved media sources, and Republicans trust only Republican-approved media sources. Perhaps the only medium that both Democrats and Republicans will accept as a valid source of information is … the stock market.　With the stock market, there is a price at which one can buy or sell. And that’s that. No alleging that Fox News peddles “alternative facts,” or MSNBC spins.　Additionally, for anyone with their wealth in financial assets, movement in the stock market aff

President Donald Trump’s unwarranted anti-Muslim ban imposed on refugees, immigrants and visitors from seven mostly impoverished and war-torn countries contained an extraordinary clause exempting Christians from these same countries from its draconian sway.　Trump then doubled-down with a tweet the following day: “Christians in the Middle-East have been executed in large numbers. We cannot allow this horror to continue!”　The cynical executive order is not only blatantly discriminatory, but it pla

Do humans act largely rationally, or can stories and rumors throw an entire economy off course? Lately, economists are increasingly recognizing that narratives matter.In the early 1920s, the US suffered a brutally sharp economic contraction, in which inflation turned rapidly to deflation and stock price-to-earnings ratios dropped to 50-year lows. The economists Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz, in their book “Monetary History of the United States,” blamed an inexperienced Federal Reserve, which