Category: General

Tomorrow morning, 8:00 am, Vice President Joe Biden will be meeting with his successor as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry.

On Foreign Policy‘s Middle East Channel today, George Washington University professor and Middle East Channel co-editor Marc Lynch has an incisive piece critiquing the recent surge in calls to bomb Iran or allow Israel to do so.

This is a guest note by Fadi Elsalameen, managing director of Palestine Note. Elsalameen shares this post with us from Ramallah where he is today. Fayyadism is not Authoritarianism In Nathan J.

I was shocked to watch the sun rise this morning — and actually saw the sun, not some gauzy, cotton candy like Beijing permanent haze. And now we see lots of blue. This is rare I’m told at this time of year.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy The Pulitzer Prize-winning Dana Priest and William Arkin have in the Washington Post blown the top of America’s fear-fueled national intelligence complex that has grown so large and extensive that the government can’t track redundancies, costs, personnel, and the like.

(Photo Credit: lyng833’s Photostream) This is a guest note by Sean Kay, who is a professor of politics at Ohio Wesleyan University and an associate of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at the Ohio State University.

It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice. — Deng Xiaoping Li Zhaoxing, pictured to the left, on my new Capitol One credit card is a very cool diplomat. During part of the Cultural Revolution, he worked in China’s Embassy in Kenya and learned Swahili.

(Shop along South Luogo Alley, Beijing; photo credit: Andrew Oros) I have seen a lot of foreigners wearing this ObaMao shirt, but no Chinese yet.

(Learning about Wuxi’s New District Industrial Park; photo credit, Peter Pi) So far, any slice of China and the Chinese people one wants to cut out is full of economic, cultural and intellectual diversity — so I fear that it is very easy for an observer to see what he or she wants to see…

When James and Deborah Fallows lived in Beijing, Jim regularly featured on his blog pictures of the weather — well, the smog — from his balcony. This is not from my balcony but it does capture just how thick the smog is in Beijing right now.