The New York Times (Continuación)

MundoOriente Próximo, , ,

Skeptics like to say that the real Israeli election only begins after the votes are counted, because the electoral system makes it practically impossible for any single party to gain a majority. This week’s election confirms that pattern.

As expected, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emerged as the leader of the largest party. However, the reduced plurality of his Likud Party (which merged with Avigdor Lieberman’s Israel Is Our Home) will further complicate the task of assembling a majority that can satisfy the policy preferences and personal ambitions of both his partner parties and his own base.

But whatever coalition is ultimately patched together, one thing is already clear: Israelis’ preoccupations have shifted and, perhaps in an unconscious echo of Barack Obama’s declared priorities for America, they want their leaders to focus on “nation-building at home.”…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesIslam y Mundo Árabe,

Before the recent French intervention in Mali began, 412,000 people had already left their homes in the country’s north, fleeing torture, summary executions, recruitment of child soldiers and sexual violence against women at the hands of fundamentalist militants. Late last year, in Algeria and southern Mali, I interviewed dozens of Malians from the north, including many who had recently fled. Their testimonies confirmed the horrors that radical Islamists, self-proclaimed warriors of God, have inflicted on their communities.

First, the fundamentalists banned music in a country with one of the richest musical traditions in the world. Last July, they stoned an unmarried couple for adultery.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica

On Jan. 10, while Hugo Chávez lay in a hospital bed in Havana, he was symbolically sworn in as Venezuela’s new president in a ceremony here. The crowd that attended his virtual inauguration was moved to tears by a recording of Mr. Chávez’s singing the national anthem. The country is experiencing the very odd circumstance of being both with and without its leader; he is not here, but his voice endures.

From the intensive care unit, the president “continues to perform his duties”; he gives orders and sends kisses to children. This is what his vice president says. According to the Supreme Court, the Congress cannot consider him absent, for no matter how ill he is, only Mr.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa,

Last week, Alexander Dolmatov, an activist in a political party opposed to Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, committed suicide at a detention center in the Netherlands. He had fled Russia last June, hoping to be granted political asylum. When his application was denied, he took his life — the only way to guarantee that he would not be deported home and, most likely, face time in prison.

A Dutch official said “the asylum denial is not the reason for his suicide,” citing a note Mr. Dolmatov, who was 36, left behind. In that note, which Mr. Dolmatov’s mother shared with me, he expressed regret for “having brought shame on everybody.”…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo, ,

Israelis go to the polls today in an election that will likely give Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a third term; like the current one, Israel’s next governing coaltion will probably be heavily reliant on right-wingers and religious parties.

Even so, Mr. Obama’s second term could offer a pivotal opportunity to restart the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In his first term, he backed away from the process, figuring that America could mediate only if the parties themselves wanted to make peace — and that new talks were unlikely to be productive.

This is a mistake. The greatest enemy to a two-state solution is the sheer pessimism on both sides.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNaturaleza,

Whether in Davos or almost anywhere else that leaders are discussing the world’s problems, they are missing by far the biggest issue: the rapidly deteriorating global environment and its ability to support civilization.

The situation is pretty much an endgame. Unless pressing issues of the biology of the planet and of climate change generated by greenhouse gas emissions are addressed with immediacy and at appropriate scale, the matters that occupy Davos discussions will be seen in retrospect as largely irrelevant.

This week, in Bonn, out of sight and out of mind, international negotiators will design the biodiversity and ecosystem equivalent to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalOrden Mundial

As President Barack Obama enters his second term, the state of the world is unsettled. The leading powers are beset with economic crises or are in various states of political transition or gridlock. The Middle East is undergoing political upheaval. Tensions are rising in Asia. The world’s institutions — whether the United Nations, the Group of 20 or the European Union — are weakened and dysfunctional. The liberal world order established after World War II is fraying at the edges.

This time of uncertainty and instability is a moment of opportunity for Obama. When the United States entered World War I, the philosopher John Dewey observed that the world was at a “plastic juncture.”…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica, ,

Chances are that French air power combined with superior numbers and equipment on the ground in Mali will prevail and force the jihadis to retreat in some fashion to the Sahel. That, however, will hardly be the end.

We know from previous wars in Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq and elsewhere that the jihadis take a long view of the global war they are waging. In Mali, one of the principal armed jihadist groups, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, has been operating for years in a vast space in the north where the Malian government has and will have little control. We know, too, that France cannot afford politically or economically to sustain a long-term intervention.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica,

The West is focused on the conflict in Mali these days, but there has also been fighting in the Central African Republic. A rebel takeover of Bangui, the capital, was narrowly averted by emergency peace talks last week.

This war may not seem as alarming as Mali’s, but it is worth noting for another reason: The C.A.R. has long been a laboratory for international peace-building initiatives, and they have failed again. The latest negotiations, held in Gabon, were the fourth major round of talks since 2002. In fact, the latest fighting was led by Seleka, a coalition of rebel groups most of which had previously signed peace agreements, and it grew out of the failures of earlier international efforts.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesIslam y Mundo Árabe

Egypt's newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, was caught on tape about three years ago urging his followers to “nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred” for Jews and Zionists. Not long after, the then-leader of the Muslim Brotherhood described Zionists as “bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians,” “warmongers” and “descendants of apes and pigs.”

These remarks are disgusting, but they are neither shocking nor new. As a child growing up in a Muslim family, I constantly heard my mother, other relatives and neighbors wish for the death of Jews, who were considered our darkest enemy. Our religious tutors and the preachers in our mosques set aside extra time to pray for the destruction of Jews.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica, ,

On Jan. 11, French military forces entered Mali, taking and inflicting casualties in a war as sudden as it is important.

Even at this early stage, broadly applicable lessons can be drawn from the conflict. Although the future course of the fighting is laden with risks, skillful diplomacy can turn it into a major opportunity in the struggle against international terrorism.

The French intervention was prompted by the combined offensive towards Bamako, the capital of Mali, of the three jihadi organizations which seized control of the northern half of the country last year. This unforeseen attack prompted the president of Mali to ask France for immediate help.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica, ,

Western powers were taken by surprise by the sudden emergence of an Islamist regime in northern Mali, and are scrambling to understand what has transpired there. Increasingly, the narrative is one of militant Islam. But the core of the conflict is the nationalist secession movement of the Tuareg people — one that in recent months has been hijacked by Islamist radicals.

In the Cold War, the West had a hard time separating out communism from nationalism. That failure led to a string of disastrous interventions, from Cuba to Vietnam. It was easier to see leaders such as Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh as tools of Moscow than try to deal with their legitimate nationalist demands.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia,

To our great peril, the scientific community has had little success in recent years influencing policy on global security. Perhaps this is because the best scientists today are not directly responsible for the very weapons that threaten our safety, and are therefore no longer the high priests of destruction, to be consulted as oracles as they were after World War II.

The problems scientists confront today are actually much harder than they were at the dawn of the nuclear age, and their successes more heartily earned. This is why it is so distressing that even Stephen Hawking, perhaps the world’s most famous living scientist, gets more attention for his views on space aliens than his views on nuclear weapons.Scientists’…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa,

The assassination of three Kurdish activists in Paris last week has raised fears that the true target was peace talks between Turkey and the rebel Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the P.K.K. But the so-called peace process was already in shambles before the killings, which have not been solved.

Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, claims that he wants a deal to end nearly 30 years of war between the state and the P.K.K. rebels. But he has yet to take the decisive action needed for a credible peace process. Until he understands that the Kurdish problem in Turkey is about politics and identity, and not just about getting the guerrillas to withdraw from Turkey and give up their weapons, there will be no hope for peace.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAsia, ,

A standoff between one of China’s biggest newspapers, Southern Weekend, and the national government ended last week with compromises on both sides. Southern Weekend hit the newsstands as usual on Thursday, after protesting staff members backed down from a threatened strike. The authorities, for their part, made tacit concessions, ending pre-publication censorship by the Communist Party’s propaganda arm in Guangdong Province and permitting greater editorial independence.

The episode drew worldwide attention to the problem of press freedom in China and threatened to escalate into broader protests across Chinese society. Over the past decade, standards of journalistic professionalism have risen in China, even though most news organizations are controlled, directly or indirectly, by the state.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica, ,

French airstrikes that began on Friday have stopped, for now, a network of terrorists, criminals and religious extremists from taking over Mali. Until the French stepped in, the near-collapse of the military had threatened to turn Mali, a landlocked, desperately poor country, into a desert stronghold for jihadists.

America, which has spent more than $500 million over the last four years to keep Islamist militants at bay in West Africa, has its hands full in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt and Libya, among other places, but it is in our national interest to support the French. North African countries, in particular Algeria, must also help save Mali from catastrophe.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoÁfrica, ,

In 2005, after the world failed to prevent mass atrocities in Rwanda, the Balkans and Darfur, the United Nations declared that nations had a responsibility to protect populations everywhere from genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

It is a fine idea, but not easy to implement, especially in Africa. There, frail democracies too often fall victim to corruption, social division, greed and dictatorship. So there, especially, the world needs to add another “responsibility to protect” — a duty of democratic nations to safeguard popular rule in neighboring lands. Too often, a failure of democracy is what starts a country down the road to atrocities.…  Seguir leyendo »

InternacionalOrden Mundial

Five years ago, four titans of American foreign policy — the former secretaries of state George P. Shultz and Henry A. Kissinger, the former defense secretary William J. Perry and the former senator Sam Nunn — called for “a world free of nuclear weapons,” giving new momentum to an idea that had moved from the sidelines of pacifist idealism to the center of foreign policy debate.

America’s 76 million baby boomers grew up during the cold war, when a deep fear of nuclear weapons permeated American life, from duck-and-cover school drills to backyard fallout shelters. Then, in the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan’s leadership, combined with immense anti-nuclear demonstrations, led to negotiations with the Soviet Union that drastically reduced the size of the two superpowers’ nuclear arsenals.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

A couple of evolutionary psychologists recently published a book about human sexual behavior in prehistory called “Sex at Dawn.” Upon hearing of the project, one colleague, dubious that a modern scholar could hope to know anything about that period, asked them, “So what do you do, close your eyes and dream?”

Actually, it’s a little more involved. Evolutionary psychologists who study mating behavior often begin with a hypothesis about how modern humans mate: say, that men think about sex more than women do. Then they gather evidence — from studies, statistics and surveys — to support that assumption. Finally, and here’s where the leap occurs, they construct an evolutionary theory to explain why men think about sex more than women, where that gender difference came from, what adaptive purpose it served in antiquity, and why we’re stuck with the consequences today.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europa,

The assassination of three Kurdish activists in Paris only days after the Turkish government announced it had started peace talks with the jailed leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, the P.K.K., underscores the difficulties of finding a lasting solution to Turkey’s most acute and thorny internal problem.

Neither the killers nor the motive in the deaths of the three women, all associated with the P.K.K., are known at this stage. But the murders were most likely an attempt to sabotage the talks.

The recently initiated negotiations involving Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned leader of the P.K.K., and Hakan Fidan, the head of Turkey’s intelligence services, are to address some of the main demands of the Kurds in return for a cease-fire in the P.K.K.’s…  Seguir leyendo »