The strain on Syria s neighbors is immense, and the conflict is inexorably seeping into the wider region. Both government and rebel forces have committed atrocity crimes.

CAMBRIDGE Don t look now, but capitalism maligned in these bailout ridden recessionary days is reshaping Africa inexorably. What is different today is that it is emanating from China and India, rather than from the conventional bastions of capitalist prowess.

Any realistic agenda for change in Cuba inexorably requires opening up to the world, along with ensuring full freedom within the country. Unfortunately, the Sixth Congress demonstrated that the Cuban Communist Party remains in denial about the country s prospects and options.

Lack of reasonably independent regulation and competent public administration or, worse, one person dictatorships lead inexorably to economic waste and inefficiency, and eventually to political turmoil. This is true even in cases like Venezuela, where large oil revenues masked the underlying weakness for a while.

In India, which is said to have a strong consensus for weak reform, things are moving far more slowly but always forward. Whereas India is not yet nearly the factor in global trade that China has become, its 1.2 billion people are pushing inexorably onto the scene.

Germany and the other eurozone members with AAA ratings will have to decide whether they are willing to risk their own credit to permit Spain and Italy to refinance their bonds at reasonable interest rates. Alternatively, Spain and Italy will be driven inexorably into bailout programs.

You can go back all the way to the stone age technological evolution roads, the wheel, writing, a lot of transportation and communication technologies has just inexorably made it so that more people can be in more non zero sum relationships with more and more people at greater and greater distances.

The EU is one of the great political milestones of mankind. For this reason, and in order to emerge stronger from the difficult situation in which Europeans now find themselves, Europe s leaders must work with the conviction that the future is inexorably linked to a more integrated and more capable Union.

President Mahmoud Abbas s failure to convene the Palestinian Legislative Assembly, due to a Hamas boycott, may lead inexorably to the final breakdown of the political structures created under the Oslo Accords. Sadly, this is only the latest chapter in the Palestinians tragic history of failed attempts to create a nation state.

Given most European countries increasingly daunting demographic outlook, the current pace of structural reform is woefully insufficient. Italy and Germany are headed toward a ratio of one retiree per worker without more rapid GDP growth, new immigration policies, higher retirement ages, and efforts to stem the increase in welfare spending, taxes will inexorably rise from already damaging levels.

In other words, Israel and Palestine are moving inexorably toward the establishment of a binational state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Such a state will be based on one of two mutually exclusive principles equal rights for all of its inhabitants or some form of apartheid, characterized by Jewish control and Palestinian subordination.

Administrators are using such measures to assess the productivity of those they hire and fund, and track the downstream impact of the research and development projects they underwrite, with little regard for the limitations of such indices. In countries like the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and Italy, research assessment exercises are inexorably creating a culture of quantification and accountability, in which citation data play an increasingly important role.

One of two things will happen either tighter containment of Iran through sanctions on oil exports will produce positive results and weaken Iran, or containment will fail, leading the US inexorably toward a new war in the Middle East. It is not unlikely that some in US foreign policy circles regard the deepening Iraqi crisis as a building block in constructing the case for military intervention in Iran.