Articles

Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian recounts his 544 days in an Iranian prison during a talk with R. Nicholas Burns of the Harvard Kennedy School.

A discussion of the state of play in the apparent final days of the Iranian nuclear negotiations and the stumbling blocks remaining on the path toward a final deal

Iran’s top nuclear negotiator was heading back to Tehran on Sunday to consult with his nation’s leadership, as negotiators remained divided over how to limit and monitor Tehran’s nuclear program and even on how to interpret the preliminary agreement they reached two months ago.

Israeli election results promise more settlements and warnings on Iran, with scant chance of a Palestinian state, Walt says

"The P5+1 should set aside the effort to craft an all-at-once comprehensive bargain and instead adopt a strategy of negotiating incremental agreements. An incremental approach has a number of advantages. The negotiators could focus on one sticking point at a time, without having to coordinate agreement on all of them at once. Negotiators could defer currently intractable issues, like enrichment capacity, until greater trust is built or new opportunities arise. Most importantly, the compromises already achieved under the JPA could be maintained and consolidated, independently of the ups and downs of ongoing negotiations."

"Although the unusual public nature and stridency of the debate struck many around the world, it is still hard for those abroad to understand how great the effect on the Israeli public has been. The Iranian nuclear programme had been the one consensual issue in an otherwise politically frenetic and deeply divided country and was dealt with, so the public believed, in a manner appropriate to the severity of the threat."

Pierpaolo Barbieri, Ernest May Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center, says that "big, international banks like Santander and BVA are well diversified. Of the others, quite a few need capital — but how much? That's the unknown and Bankia has undermined faith in financial reporting."

Cell phone use has grown faster in Africa than in any other region of the world since 2003....Of course, South Africa—the most developed nation—still has the highest penetration, but across Africa, countries have leapfrogged technology, bringing innovation and connectivity even to remote parts of the continent, opening up mobile banking and changing the way business is done.

The effort to address climate change stumbled with the failure to pass cap-and-trade. What should happen now? Five experts, including the Harvard Project's Joe Aldy, discuss the future of U.S. climate and energy policy.