World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

We’ve talked an awful lot about growing dissatisfaction with the state all over the world.  That dissatisfaction is not confined, obviously, to the left; it is also deeply embedded in the right, in both the conservative and libertarian wings of the right.  As protesters in Kiev pull down the statue of Lenin, here’s a libertarian in the European Parliament criticizing the policies of the state:

Jennifer Grout, a 23 year old from Massachusetts, did very well on the show, “Arabs Got Talent”, in Beirut, Lebanon.  What is extraordinary is that she only knows a few words in Arabic (and she does not have a Boston accent at all).  Her singing is quite lovely.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Iranian nuclear deal is that the sanctions against Iran appear to have been very successful.  It is rare for sanctions to have such a dramatic effect since they are very often violated.  It seems as if the world had the technological means to put the squeeze on Iran in ways that could not be subverted–in a real sense it was an NSA surveillance-type operation on financial transactions.  Additionally, the sanctions against Iranian oil exports was accomplished without significant disruption to global petroleum markets.  The key to that success was the new fracking techniques that allowed the US to increase its petroleum production by about 2 million barrels a day.