Regions

President Cristina Fernández Kirchner has reason to be optimistic. The first female president of Argentina is very likely to be competing for reelection in October and the latest opinion polls show that she is significantly more popular than her political rivals. Although the President’s popularity has taken dips in the past and her political career has seen its share of scandal, the government has been able to quickly recover its levels of popular approval. In 2009, President Kirchner achieved only slightly more than 30 percent approval in opinion polls; however, in a more recent Ipsos-Mora y Araújo poll, 65 percent of those interviewed described the presidential image as “good,” or even “very good.”

The image of hundreds of Syrian women, carrying white cloths and olive branches in a protest against the government’s mass arrests of the men of their village in April, was indeed powerful. There, in the town of Baida, the women had seemed to be political equals of their men in the way they stood up, side by side, for their cause. Yet such seeming equality proves only to be an illusion for most Syrian women in their domestic lives. In fact, gender discrimination in Syrian law serves to institutionalize the social and cultural stigmas associated with sexual abuse, honor crimes, and divorce.

With a harsh legal system that is hostile to governmental opposition, Malaysia is known as one of Asia’s most politically conservative countries. However, it may soon retire from this position of dubious honor, given Prime Minister Najib Razak’s recently announced plans to revolutionize Malaysia’s political climate. With political reform following so swiftly after Najib’s  succession of economic reforms last year, political activists and leaders of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat alliance have been willing to offer praise, though their appreciation is tempered by wariness. Najib has built a reputation for grand gestures while in office, and one cannot assume the purity of his intentions.

When a calamitous earthquake and tsunami struck the east coast of Japan in March 2011, few could have guessed just how far the aftershock would reach. Japan, one of the world’s largest economies and a powerhouse in East Asia, was left utterly devastated and economically crippled, with entire regions flooded and thousands dead or missing. The disaster also set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, under pressure from a mobilized German public and a growing green movement, to announce that Germany would close all its nuclear power plants by 2022.