♦ For more than 30 years, female singers in Iran have not been able to sing solo or perform to a mixed audience. Hassan Rouhani’s softening rhetoric has many hoping that restrictions on cultural life will also be eased.
♦ Growing public anger about immigration from former Soviet states poses a dilemma for Vladimir Putin as he seeks to build a regional trade bloc with Russia’s neighbours.
♦ There is something to be learned about people’s personalities from the way they cycle.
♦ Businesses and residents in Chinatowns from London to San Francisco fear that the struggle to keep up with rising rents and other challenges is threatening their communities. Caitlin Moran at The Times thinks that the “self-selecting majority of the wealthy and conservative” could be good news for the rest of the UK, as the young people locked out of the capital choose to make their home towns glorious instead.
♦ Egypt’s deputy prime minister Ziad Bahaa-Eldin is an advocate for restraint, but the political climate in the country has put him under fire from both the military’s supporters and its critics.
♦ Ryan Crocker, a former US ambassador to Afghanistan and Iraq, argues that talks with Iran have succeeded in the past and can succeed again. He uses his discussions with Iranian diplomats after 9/11 as an example: “The Iranians were constructive, pragmatic and focused… And then, suddenly, it all came to an end when President George W. Bush gave his famous "Axis of Evil" speech in early 2002.”
♦ Chrystia Freeland considers how and why populists, “the wilder the better”, are taking over from the plutocrats.
♦ The New York Times examines how the NSA has been revealed as “an electronic omnivore of staggering capabilities, eavesdropping and hacking its way around the world to strip governments and other targets of their secrets, all the while enforcing the utmost secrecy about its own operations.” Continue reading » | 
