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Costas Paris interviews Lucas Papdemos, former prime minister of Greece, and a former vice president of the ECB. Papademos points to the grave consequences for Greece of an exit from the euro with high inflation and higher interest rates, and gains in price competitiveness diminished by the inflation. He says Greece must stick to the committments for cutting spending and new taxes made earlier under his government.

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This was one of the last reports written by Anthony Shadid, New York Times foreign correspondent, before his death in Syria. It covers the Islamist movement's shift to modernism and incorporating an outlook that includes ideas of liberal democracy from Britain, as seen from Tunisia. No longer is the main source of ideas coming from Egypt. A diverse group of thought is being developed in Arab and North Africa, and in places like London, where emigres from the Middle East during the years of repression gathered to discuss ideas for the future. Said Ferjani's as one of these emigres is one of sources of the new thinking and approaches of Islamist thought.

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Friedman reports from an election booth in the Shubra el-Khema neighborhood of Cairo during the Egypptian parliamentary elections in 2012. He says the realities are quite different as the poorly educated women who were voting described their day to day concerns to Friedman about security, education for the children and social services. The Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafist Al Nour party win most of the seats. Yet the democracy protests have empowered all parts of Egyptian society, and has created checks and balances in the process.

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Former U.S. president Bush says the U.S. has an important role as a beacon of freedom, human rights and democracy in the world. The U.S. should not shrink from the challenges in the name of a false and temporary stability, and flexibility should not mean ambiguity, difficulties should not mean shrugging away from America's role. Patience, creativity and active American leadership are needed. The Bush administration supported the struggles of people in central Europe and in other countries. This is from a speech Bush gave at the Bush Institute, Southern Methodist University in Dallas, a year into the Arab Spring. A speech that was giving voice to the aspirations of people in the Arab world.

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As expected Iran boycotts the talks in Doha of 16 major oil producers seeking to stabilize oil prices. Saudi Arabia, Russia, Qatar and Venezuela sought to stabilize oil production at January levels to support oil prices. Wth the Saudia and Russia producing all out, Iran seeks to do the same, effectively closing the door on any agreement to freeze production levels.

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In 2013 the Greece government of Antonis Samaras made a study of wartime costs incurred by Greece for damaged infrastructure during the Nazi occupation of Greece and Nazil loans forced on Greece between 1942-1944. The estimate exceeded 200 billion dollars. Die Linke, a socialist party in Germany in the European parliament allied to Syriza, also supports debt forgiveness.

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Defense Secretary Gates does not see Russia as the threat it was in the Cold War, first because Russia's conventional forces are a "shadow" of what they were during the Cold War, and Russia has adverse demographic trends that will diminish Russia's ability in conventional forces. He sees the Georgian war in the context of Russia's seeking to exorcize, as he puts it, past humiliations. And Gates sees opportunities in the relationship with Russia. Such things as Russia's willingness to work with the US on Afghanistan. Evidence of this is Russia supporting the renwal of the UN resolution on Afghanistan. Another indication is that Russia he says is very worried about the drugs coming out of Afghanistan, and has been supportive to provide alternative routes for Europeans to get equipment and supplies into Afghanistan. These views come across in an interview on December 17, with Charlie Rose, a five time elected Congressman, for the PBS Charlie Rose show. They are also reflected in an article in Foreign Affairs journal's current issue. Gates was a CIA analyst and has some insightful observations. Gates told Charlie Rose that he does not see the Islamic radicals and violent Islamic extremists as a threat in the same way as the threat in the Cold War years. This threat is not as big as the threat to freedom during the Cold War. He says the failure in strategic communications was huge as agencies of the US government engaged in activities in other countries, like the Agency for International Development and the US Information Agency, were neglected starting in the in the 1990's. Communications in other countries of what the US represented and stands for was left to the Pentagon, a role the Pentagon was ill-suited for. He sees the Islamic terrorism as more of an ideological conflict. Speaking at a town hall meeting at the Balad Air Force base in Iraq, in December, Gates pointed to these communications failures as a real challenge for the new administration. But he now sees a huge opportunity in this past failure, and ways of addressing it creatively, in addition to commiting resources and people to this effort. Walter Pincus wrote this article, and its part of the fineprint analysis effort at the Washington Post in which speeches, reports, and other documents are examined by people like Pincus, to catch the really important things, uncovering the fine print that really makes the headlines. Another aspect of this fineprint effort is that there are a huge number of reports, and speeches and documents that had a tone reminiscent of the Cold War during the Georgia war and yet they do not correctly reflect the real situation about Russia, as Gates sees it from his analysis of what is actually happening. Gates has used Foreign Affairs, the Dec 17 Charlie Rose Show on PBS in which he was interviewed, and the speech at the Balad Air Force base in Iraq, to communicate his views and analysis. They are important to underline and emphasize precisely because they show that all that cold war hysteria reporting and speeches may be misleading and lead to improper conclusions and mistakes in policy, wasted effort, wasted resources, and lost lives. And just as the US strategic communications was starved of resources and effort, so also this necessary work to retrieve and give emphasis to the important things is neglected. One additional link to this is the speech, discussion, and QA session in Washington DC at the time of the G20 summit in which President Medvedev and the new administration's elder statesman and diplomat Marilyn Albright, former secretary of state, expressed their hopes and plans for a new era in Russian-American relations. ...

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February 1, 2011, the day when a million demonstrators were expected to come out on Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Washington Post makes a call for a democratic transition in Egypt. The Post says unfortunately the debate has been affected by considerable misinformation and mistaken ideas. It singles out three for correction. The protestors have no platform, that the radical Islamists are likely to assume power, and that the US has little power to influence the change. The April 6 Movement is a principal organizer of the protests and is run by young people. The party of Mohamed El-Baradei and the Muslim Brotherhood have joined together with the young protestors movement to have a common platform. And in a country where an estimated two thirds of the population is under 30 years, the older leaders in the El-Baradei party and the Muslim Brotherhood are deferring to the younger leaders. The movement is middle class, centrist, and its main grievance is the yearning for liberty. Eliott Abrams, the deputy national security advisor to former President George W. Bush, and Mr Bush on C-SPAN, have come out in favor of the Egyptian people's struggle for freedom. See Abrams column in the Post. The Muslim Brotherhood is unlikely to win anything more than a minority of seats in any elections, because the overwhelming influence in the protests is secular, middle class, and seeks the democratization and modernization of Egypt. For the American people this is an opportunity to support the aspirations to freedom and a modernized economy for the Egyptian people....

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France with about 6 million Muslims and a history of colonial rule in North African Arab countries (Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and other countries) faces a challenge of integrating Muslims into French society. Germany with a large population of Turkish origin also faces a similiar challenge. The attack on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo for poking fun at Islam, in a manner similiar to its satirical work on Catholicism, leads to the death of 12 journalists, a policeman and a policewoman. Erlanger and Bennhold describe the reaction of people in France. Peter Neumann, director of the International Center for the Study of Radicalization at King's College , London, says about anti-immigrant sentiment increasing in Europe to the point where it is uncoupling working class families from the elites in Europe and reaching into the mainstream of society.

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Inozemtsev of the Institute of Post-Industrial Studies in Moscow, asks the question wht if the Russian economy shows no growth in 2017, and 2015-2016 become the beginning of a serious downturn. If oil prices remain low for an extended period as now looks likely with factors such as shale oil technologies, Iranian oil, and Saudi policy, playing an increasingly long term role, Russia could face some of the problems former finance minister, Alexei Kudrin, other business leaders including head of Sberbank, warned about. A major problem that Inozemtsev points to is the change in the business climate for foreign investment in 2012-2016 as the Russian economy looks more inward, and the departure of many foreign companies. During the period 2000-2008, a major boost to the economy came from foreign investment which brought with it management and technological improvements. No emerging market country, including China, can have a bright future without access to new technologies and investments from foreign investment. The current period starting in 2009 stands in sharp contrast to the earlier period with the Russian economy lacking the boost from foreign investment, facing capital outflows, and international conflicts creating a long term effect on oil prices. Russia needed time to move its economy away from commodity dependence through technological improvements and investment, yet this does not appear to be happening, raising serious questions....

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David Brooks of the NYT describes the approach taken by British prime minister David Cameron and his Conservative Party government to help the working class poor in Britain, and tackle the social roots of poverty. He says an American adaptation similar to this is badly needed in the Republican Party, with the candidates in the election providing solutions from an old rulebook. Only after Trump's popularity with appeals to less educated older Americans has the Republican leadership responded, with Speaker Ryan helping organize a forum on poverty under the Jack Kemp Foundation- emphasis was placed on education, work, opportunity and accountability for anti-poverty programs in the discussion moderated by Ryan and Senator Tim Scott. Less attention was paid to the other social aspects mentioned here by Brooks, and cited by Cameron when he described the inadequacy of traditional solutions from the right and left of the political spectrum. Cameron outlined the principles of his anti-poverty plans called "Life Chances Strategy," in a speech on Jan. 11, 2016, in north London, with the entrie transcript on the gov.uk website. Cameron acknowledged in the speech that social issues including single parent families, and other social problems such as long term unemployment, can make it harder for some people to use self-reliance and personal responsibility in a growing economy as a way to grasp opportunities. Cameron proposes a combination of economic, social and job growth strategies. His second term plans include 30 hours a week of free childcare for 3 and 4 year olds so both parents can work, parental maternity leave, expansion of Troubled Families Program, in addition to the introduction of National Living Wage, tax cuts, universal credit. In tackling social aspects of the problem Cameron cited the need for development in the early years of childhood, the huge importance of family, social connections and experiences, informal mentors, cultural experiences, broadenend horizons, that enable young people to acquire language skills, character and resilience. Second term projects include expanding reach of high performing schools to deprived areas, emphasis on core English, math, science, history, geography Ebacc skills, a 1 billion pound investment in the National Citizens Service by 2021, a plan to transform housing estates including rebuilding from scratch, additional 1 billion pounds to provide mental health treatment including treatment within 2 weeks in homes and communities. Throughout Cameron's "Life Chances strategy" is aimed at tackling not just the material dimensions of poverty, but also what he describes is broken in Britain- "the paucity of opportunity."...

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In Bagour, Egypt, in the crowded Nile delta, the old order was represented by Kamal-al-Shazli, a member of Parliament from the ruling party for 46 years. This means he entered Parliament in 1964, eight years after the Suez Crisis of 1956, when Egypt under a young military officer Gamal Abdel Nasser confronted the British and the French over the Suez Canal. Everything here in this town was done through Mr Shazli, the ultimate system of paronage was in place, and everything was named after him. Only the slogans of the anti-colonialism days, the days of hope of improving the living conditions of the people, remain. Everything else has stayed much the same for the vast majority of people. Now the task of changing things requires people to think for themselves and learn to work together to guide their own affairs under a democratic system of government and free expression. And this is quite different from the system in place for over 50 years, just as happened in the old Soviet Union. The old system was held together through a patronage system, bribes, enforced by the ruling party and its state security, and one in which individuals had to trust in the state to do their thinking for them about running the country....

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Higgins cites the IMF and other experts on Greece's debt being unsustainable. He includes a long discussion with Charles Dallara who negotiated in the Brady Plan restructurings for Latin American debt, and for the European banks in 2010-2012 with the EU. Dallara says the issue has become politicized with national parliaments involved making it difficult to tackle the issue of debt reduction. Dallara points out that the Brady plan restructurings were possible because national parliaments were not involved.

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Charlie Hebdo weekly is part of a long tradition of satirical magazines that poke fun at leaders and organized religion including Catholicism and Islam. This dates back to the days of the French Revolution. The magazine received many threats from Islamists. In January 2015 attacks by 3 young terrorists killed 12 journalists, a policeman and a police woman.

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The shift of voters from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party in the South such as Georgia and South Carolina, and the Deep South such as Mississippi and Alabama, started in the sixties with the civil rights movement. Reagan tapped into it by making his first post convention trip to Alabama, where George Wallace had already worked up white southern voters on segregation in the way Trump is doing today on immigration. Strom Thurmond was one of the high profile southerners shifting from Dixiecrat Democrat to Republican in South Carolina. After Thurmond in the fifties the Republican formula was to mix cultural issues with economic conservatism, with Nixon, then Reagan, and then Bush. Reagan added religious conservatives to the cause. Now says Emory University Prof. Joseph Crespino, this is changing as the more educated college educated white collar professionals that Goldwater once appealed to shifting in 2016 to the Democratic Party in places like Georgia and South Carolina. This is a result of the rhetoric of Trump resembling that of George Wallace and Thurmond in the Deep South. With demographic changes there is also new infusion of people from the North to the South in major urban areas. The result in 2016 is that the South no longer appears the way it once was. ...

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Julia Preston of the NYT looks at Mr. Trump's speech on August 31, 2016 in Pheonix, Arizona, and compares what one can discern about the Trump policies on immigration with that of president Obama. She points out that it is similar to the deportation that was conducted under president Obama in some ways, but is more extensive in its dimensions. It includes sanctioning sanctuary cities, expanding the deportation law enforcement personnel, and deporting about 2 million people with criminal backgrounds. The estimate under the Obama administration is for about 176,000 people with such backgrounds. The Trump estimate appears to include people with minor offenses says Preston, because it is so much higher. As a result this could also include people who have no criminal background and disrupt families on a large scale, with hundreds of thousands of longtime residents and families deported. Under the sanctuary example of Trump, Denver, New York and counties in California would be places where Trump would cut off federal funding. On the wall itself, Mexico's president Nieto says he told Trump Mexico would not pay for the wall, and Trump says exactly the opposite that Mexico would pay for the wall in his speech to supporters.  A Gallup poll shows that 76% of Republicans, 91% of Democrats favor a path to citizenship for those here in the U.S. illegally. For the whole population only 15% oppose giving illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship and 84% support doing this. Which suggests that Trump is only appealing to his base of support, not adding to it, as Cillizza points out in the WP fact check.   ...

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Greek leader Alexis Tsipras of the Syriza party, the Coalition of the Radical Left, talks to Angelos and Granitsas of the Journal. He says it is in the interests of the European Union to continue funding to Greece, but if the EU stops the funding Greece will stop paying its debt. It will then use the funds going to the debt burden for paying retirees and workers. And it will also tear up the loan agreements signed earlier, and scrap plans for layoff of 150,000 workers in the government services by 2015. He would also reverse measures to lower private sector wages. He also looks favorably on nationalizing banks to better channel lending to where its needed. In his view it will be difficult for Greece either way. Even with funding Greece's GDP is expected to fall 5-7% in 2012, following several years of declining GDP.

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Krugman reflects on the discontent in Europe reflected in anti-EU opinion at the time of the elections to the European parliament in 2014.

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Laurence Peter of the BBC News describes a meeting of EU leaders in December 2016. The new Europa building with its space egg shape will be the location of the next summit in 2016, adding to a sense of history that the EU idea has witnessed since the 1950's, even optimism about far it has come at a time of a few setbacks.  He points out that Theresa May was not without persons to talk to at the meeting, though some video clips showed her looking lonely. EU president Martin Schulz said he was emotional seeing students crying after the Brexit vote, but that it was time to find solutions and not be emotional today. Lunch was offered at the meeting by Spain and Portugal, to mark the 30 years since they joined. People forget how much the European Community meant to the two countries after decades of suffering under fascist dictatorships- it meant new hope and an opportunity to set things right. Problems facing the EU today include, the frustration at the carnage in Aleppo, Syria, how to deal with Britain and Brexit, setting up an asylum system that will work, dealing with Ukraine and Russia without making the situation worse, and remaining concerns about the Greece debt crisis. ...

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Islamist parties are having difficulty integrating into political life and bridging the differences with secularist or liberal political parties in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Pakistan and Turkey following the democratic transition in 2011-2013 in the Muslim world. Some progress has been made, but lack of experience, lack of respect for the opposition and other opinion, overreaching, personal styles of individual leaders such as Erdogan and Morsi, and poor economic conditions after decades of neglect under military rulers in Egypt and other countries, is creating problems for Islamist parties in government.