Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters

The last time I saw Anna Day we were both attending a conference in Dubai. That was just last month, in February. I hopped a plane back to the United States. She went to Bahrain, and was promptly arr…

The attacks in Brussels this week are accelerating an already heated conversation in Europe about the unrelenting movement of refugee from the Middle East to the continent. 

My guest today Somini Sengupta is the United Nations correspondent for the New York Times. She's the author of the new book The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India's Young which tells the story o…

The Islamic state is seemingly on the ascent in Libya. It controls territory, including the coastal city of Sirte, and over the past several weeks it has launched a series of spectacular attacks in L…

Thomas Fuller was the longtime Southeast Asia correspondent for the New York Times. He's now based in San Francisco, but his last posting from the region caught my attention. Fuller describes a scene…

Ashish Thakkar is an African entrepreneur who started his business at the age of 15 having just escaped from the Rwanda genocide. That business, the Mara Group, is now a multi-billion dollar enterpri…

On March 1 a man named Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi  made an appearance at the international criminal court in the hague, and in so doing earned the dubious distinction of being the first person to ever ap…

Dr. Raj Shah served as the administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, from 2010 to 2015. He was just 36 years old when he was appointed to this cabinet-level posi…

By now you have probably heard of the legal and public relations battle between the FBI and Apple. In short, the FBI is trying to force Apple to unlock the phone of one of the San Bernardino shooters…

Susan Benesch is the founding director of the Dangerous Speech Project. And in this role she has helped to create a set of guidelines that helps policy makers and observers deduce the conditions unde…

Burundi is in a tailspin. It has been for the last year since President Pierre Nkurinziza decided to run for a constitutionally dubious third term in office. That set off protests, a violent suppress…

I'm coming to you from World Government Summit this week, which is a conference dedicated to ideas and technologies to make government work more effectively.  It's sort of a cross between TED talks a…

The United Kingdom plays host to a major conference this week intended to raise money and political support for the Syrian humanitarian disaster. There are now over 4.6 million Syrian refugees who ha…

Raymond Baker was a newly minted Harvard Business School graduate working in Nigeria in the 1960s when he discovered that foreign businesses were nefariously sneaking money out of the country. After …

Earlier this week the World Health Organization warned that a mosquito borne viral disease known as Zika was fast spreading throughout the Americas. That includes the United States, which it will lik…

Elizabeth Economy has for decades studied something that used to be considered somewhat obscure, but today is very much in vogue: the relationship between Chinese politics and economy to climate chan…

Dan Byman was fresh out of school when he took a job as an analyst for the CIA. Byman was a generalist, and they put him on a backwater Persian gulf desk in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Then Sadda…