- The breakout Palestinian star of this year's Arab Idol provides an irresistible metaphor for the Middle East peace process.
- Construction on the world's tallest building is due to start in China in June. Is it a folly, a trophy, or the future of green building?
- Indo-Pacific: the far-reaching implications of a change in government terminology.
- During Thein Sein's visit to Washington, Barack Obama referred repeatedly to 'Myanmar' rather than 'Burma'.
- the World Bank looks at the arrival of high speed broadband in Tonga and the spread of mobile phones in the Solomon Islands.
- How drought spurred the Syrian uprising.
- Humanitarian arguments for military intervention don't take account of what else could be done with the resources.
- Daniel McCarthy on Washington's proposed Asian trading bloc, the Trans Pacific Partnership:
China is in the paradoxical position of being vastly more powerful than any of its neighbors, yet being surrounded by so many suspicious states large and small—not only the likes of Vietnam and Japan, but such giants as Russia and India—that it will never enjoy the freedom to throw its weight around that the U.S. enjoys now or that the Soviet Union once wielded in Europe. China is both paramount and constrained; what TPP does is to give Beijing one more reason to resent its condition.