WASHINGTON — In a televised speech from the annual meeting of his Shura advisory council on September 25, Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz declared that women could be appointed members of the 150-member Shura assembly in the next term and will be able to run for office and vote in municipal elections in 2015. [...]

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RICHMOND, Va.—I grew up in northern Japan, and in the 15 years I lived there, earthquakes were a part of everyday life. We had earthquake drills all the time; and we also had the real thing, regular tremors of varying strength and impact. The 9.0-magnitude earthquake and ensuing 30-foot tsunami on March 11 were the [...]

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WASHINGTON — In 2010, Nicolas Sarkozy dismantled camps of Roma migrants in France, Barack Obama’s Justice Department sued Arizona over a law targeting illegal immigrants, and far-right parties across Europe gained traction by stoking xenophobic sentiment. Though polarizing headlines abounded, it behooves governments to pay attention to what the public is actually saying on immigration [...]

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MEMPHIS, Tennessee — The human and civil rights drama unfolding in Belarus in the aftermath of the electoral fraud perpetrated by the regime of Aleksandr Lukashenko should be a teaching moment.  It shows that hopes of bringing Belarus closer to the West through a policy of carefully calibrated carrots and sticks were largely an illusion.  [...]

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BERLIN — Rarely has an EU summit been as turbulent as the one on September 16. Viviane Reding, the EU’s justice commissioner, charged France with mass deportations of Roma, violating EU law by, according to a leaked French government document, specifically targeting this group. A fierce dispute ensued between Reding, backed by European Commission president [...]

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“The President obviously is a – is Christian. He prays every day. He communicates with his religious advisor every single day.” These words came from an Obama White House spokesman on August 19, at the height of the controversy over building a “mosque” near the site of the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City [...]

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According to this year’s Transatlantic Trends survey, Turkey can be seen as drifting away from the West. How do we know? After surveying approximately 1,000 people in Turkey (along with about 1,000 in the United States and each of 11 European Union countries) on a host of foreign policy and economic policy questions, we found [...]

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BERLIN — On September 11, Geert Wilders, the controversial Dutch politician who likened the Koran to Mein Kampf, will speak in New York on the anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, warning about the supposed dangers of Islam and the building of a “ground-zero mega-mosque.” That the proposed structure is neither [...]

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BRUSSELS — As aspiring Middle East peacemakers descend on Washington this week, one absentee has already been noted. Baroness Catherine Ashton, the EU foreign policy chief, chose to pass up dinner at the White House and instead pressed ahead with her trip to China, where she inaugurated a new strategic dialogue with her Chinese counterpart. [...]

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WASHINGTON — The 2010 World Cup, which kicks off Friday in Johannesburg, will present a number of intriguing match-ups that will play out on green grass, not on international waters, in conference rooms, or through diplomatic backchannels. But more than that, it will lay bare a narrowing gap between the traditional soccer powers of Europe [...]

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