• OPINION

  Panama Papers blame-game hides the real issue

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 18/04/2016

  » Last week, a respected Russia scholar in the US speculated that the Kremlin might be behind the so-called Panama Papers, the big dump of data about offshore accounts that has implicated several countries' officials in shady dealings. And on Thursday, President Vladimir Putin of Russia blamed the US for the leak.

• OPINION

  Integrate and treat a Muslim better, hurt Islamic State

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 27/04/2016

  » It is intuitively appealing to connect the number of fighters a country sends to the Islamic State (IS) with poverty and inequality. The more desperate and economically downtrodden people are, the more likely it is that they'll join a terrorist group, right? Wrong, recent research indicates: It's much more likely that the reasons for the IS's recruitment success are cultural.

• OPINION

  Politicians should be keeping their money at home

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 07/04/2016

  » Ramon Fonseca, a founding partner of Mossack Fonseca, the Panamanian offshore incorporator that has suffered the biggest leak of privileged information in history, has told Financial Times that the investigations stemming from the leak are an attack on the basic human right to privacy. Dmitri Peskov, spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, described them as an attack on his boss ahead of the 2018 presidential election. The investigative journalists themselves see their effort as a strike against corruption and money-laundering. So what purpose do the Panama Papers investigations really serve?

• OPINION

  Don't trust Putin's troop pullback

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 16/03/2016

  » President Vladimir Putin's unexpected announcement that Russian troops would pull back from Syria shouldn't be taken at face value: he's made similar announcements in the past to show Western negotiating partners how constructive he can be. He always has a hidden agenda.

• OPINION

  Defining 'greatness' at core of 2016 presidential race

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 23/03/2016

  » In two months on the road covering the 2016 presidential primaries, I've seen the US going through something of an identity crisis, after decades of dominance. The candidates are talking about what the voters are thinking about: What does it mean for the US to be great? 

• OPINION

  Underdogs survive 'Super Tuesday'

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 03/03/2016

  » East High School in Denver, Colorado, home to 14 precincts for the Democratic caucuses, was a mob scene on Tuesday night. It was hard to judge the turnout, but one of the organisers told me there were about 5,000 people there, and I believed him: Rooms designated for caucusing were overflowing, and several precincts gave up and held their votes in the stairwell or outside the building.

• OPINION

  David Bowie, artist and visionary businessman

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 13/01/2016

  » David Bowie was that rare kind of rock star, you didn't have to like his music to admire him. Bowie was a business visionary like the ones who shaped Silicon Valley who just didn't see the point of building companies. He was his own greatest product. 

• OPINION

  Pope's historic meeting ends up benefitting Putin

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 15/02/2016

  » Russia's state-owned media covered the first-ever meeting between Pope Francis and Kirill, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, as a historic event. The official news agency, Tass, even ran a real-time blow-by-blow account. The meeting's value wasn't in any ecclesiastical breakthrough: The Pope, probably inadvertently, played a part in a Kremlin propaganda gambit.

• OPINION

  Emissions lawsuit tipped to scare VW out of US market

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 07/01/2016

  » The US government's lawsuit against Volkswagen threatens the German automaker with such heavy penalties that, in hindsight, it may not have been worth it for VW to be present in the US market at all.

• OPINION

  Violence takes root in our words

  News, Leonid Bershidsky, Published on 14/12/2015

  » The Oxford Dictionaries' selection for the 2015 Word of the Year -- the "Face with Tears of Joy" emoji -- suggests that UK linguists live in a rather carefree world. In other countries, the selections were not as upbeat.

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