Christian Science Monitor

As guest blogger Anya Landau French wrote in The Havana Note last week, after debates in Tampa, the candidates were “all singing the same broken record,” many taking a hard-line approach to appeal to exiles in Florida. Newt Gingrich said he would try ...

When Muhammad Yunus won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work on microfinance with the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, he would have been mortified to know that a version of his model would one day force his country’s poor into the organ trade. At the time, microfinance (particularly the practice of giving small loans to the unsalaried poor with low to no collateral) was revered for its ability to “do good while doing well.” In other words, it enabled people to escape poverty while turning a profit.

Whenever someone asked me why we have the same anachronistic policy toward an island nation 90 ninety from our shores that we have had for half a century, I generally tell them that Cuba simply "doesn't matter." In a big-picture sense, our policy hasn't changed (or has only gotten hotter) since the Cold War ended and left two combatants behind on the field.

A report released by the New America Foundation in October found that while locals in Helmand say the Taliban are weaker now compared with 12 months ago, 49 percent of the population say they believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. ...

I've just finished reading a new report by Professor Richard Feinberg, a former Clinton administration official and non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.  "Reaching Out: Cuba's New Economy and the International Response," clocked in at a daunting 101 pages but should nonetheless be required reading for anyone following the island nation's long-awaited economic restructuring.

Still, that goal should have been attainable, says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget in Washington. “It will not reflect well on the people who used this opportunity to move toward compromise to, instead, ...

“The whole push to go big has been surprisingly contagious,” says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “Members have pushed themselves out of their comfort zones, and I feel like a deal is completely within ...

“He can step down confident he's not going to miss any action,” says Daniel Levy, co-director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation in Washington. “And confident as well that he's left behind a situation that is not going to ...

For the first time in 50 years, Cubans will be able to freely buy and sell their homes. As news of this long-awaited and the biggest yet of Raul Castro’s slow-moving but continuing, irreversible economic reform campaign in Cuba reverberated on and off the island, policymakers in Washington are increasingly – embarrassingly – out of step with what’s actually happening on the island today. It's like the US embargo has become a wax feature at Madame Tussauds: questionably life-like and stuck forever in one moment in time.

... and it's clearly in their best interest to see a sustainable fiscal plan in place so they can invest,” says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, who has been working with the bipartisan group. ...