Regions & Nations

What does America's disastrous bombing of Pakistani soldiers this week have to do with President Obama's much-ballyhooed trip to East Asia last week? Between them, they suggest that the Obama administration may be, finally, edging toward a foreign-policy doctrine.

In Silicon Valley, the word “pivot” has a specific, even hallowed meaning. “Pivot means you adjust as necessary,” says Mbwana Ailly, an entrepreneur in residence at I/O Ventures, a startup investment company in San Francisco. “When a tech investor bets on a project, they’re betting on the team and their chops not only to develop a product, but to adjust as needed… Pivot means okay, this didn’t work, but let’s go!”

The global explosion of mobile phone technology has spawned a host of applications, products and services facilitating development outcomes from financial inclusion to improved maternal health. While these innovations have proven an essential lifeline for the world’s most vulnerable, most ignore the basic function of a mobile phone - its voice capacity.

A service called “I-Call” aims to solve the problem of education in Africa and other developing regions of the world by getting back to basics.

The world is rapidly changing and global innovations are leading the way. Innovations in technology, business practices and design are changing how we make friends, make money and have fun.

And innovations are coming from all over the world, not just Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurial hotpots exist in Singapore, Kenya, Brazil and South Korea, to name a few.

Local innovators and global companies have created billions in wealth and millions of jobs in fields such as telecommunications, health, financial services and clean tech.

Will it be able to come up with a new one? Here is a story that Robert O’Brien tells in a recent paper in the journal China Security. In 2005, China’s National Development and Reform Commission, which had the power to set government procurement policies, said that state-owned wind farms could only buy turbines that had 70 percent of their parts made in China.

Pakistani-American businessman Mansoor Ijaz has set off a political firestorm in Pakistan with his claims that he was brokering an offer from Pakistan's civilian leaders to the Pentagon to unseat the leadership of the Pakistani military.

A decade ago, as a bookish schoolgirl in the southern Egyptian city of Sohag, Samira Ibrahim Mohamed was fascinated by Egyptology and yearned to see the antiquities at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo one day.

But when she finally set foot on the grounds of the landmark pink stone building, on March 9, the museum had been turned into a makeshift torture center. Ms. Mohamed, who had just been arrested by the army during a protest on nearby Tahrir Square, was given electric shocks that she said made her body twitch spasmodically for days afterward.

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.

The mood at this year’s Valdai Club meeting was gloomy, which was inevitable since it took place against a background of the stagnation in Russia and the United States and the crisis in Europe. In Russia, both state and society appear to lack the capacity for internal regeneration. If this is so, then Russia can still continue fairly successfully along its present path as long as energy prices remain high, but it will not build up the kind of new economy that will be able to replace energy as a source of wealth in the long term.

My favorite remark in Saturday night’s “commander in chief” debate, in which the Republican presidential candidates answered questions about national security in one-minute sound bites, came from Michele Bachmann. "If you look at China, they don't have food stamps," she said.