Nabil Giacaman has worked in his father’s shop off of Bethlehem’s Manger Square for as long as he can remember. He is the third generation in his family to make a living crafting wood and mother-of-pearl figurines, peddling miniature nativity scenes and baby Jesuses to the tourists who flock to this famed plaza just steps from the spot where Christians believe Jesus was born. He will also be the last.

On the face of it, China’s recent declaration of an air defense identification zone (ADIZ) extending to territories that it does not control has nothing in common with America’s arrest and strip-search of a New York-based Indian diplomat for allegedly underpaying a housekeeper she had brought with her from India. In fact, these episodes epitomize both powers’ unilateralist approach to international law.

Emperor Akihito, on the occasion of his 80th birthday on Monday, repeated his intention to do his best amid expectations that he will hand over some of his official duties to the younger generation in the year after next. “While accepting the limits arising from age, I hope to continue to fulfill my role as best I can,” the Emperor said at a customary press conference Wednesday ahead of his birthday.

Ukraine's Euromaidan protesters have pledged to stay the course until their political demands are met. So what are their chances? RFE/RL looks at the outcomes of two protests that achieved their aims in Georgia and Serbia -- and two, in Russia and Belarus, that didn't.

I knew Nelson Mandela's name almost as soon as I knew my own. Over the hum of Saturday morning cartoons, my South African mother told me Nelson Mandela was her hero. She explained that South Africa was her home, and that was where Mandela came from. As a child, I couldn't comprehend her stories about South Africa and Mandela's bravery—my mother's home seemed like a myth—but as I grew older, I began to understand her stories.

While China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba officially claim to be communist states, the country that adheres most strictly to communist principles, according to Oxford University scholar Robert Service, is North Korea. He should know, he wrote the book on it — Comrades! A History of World Communism. Today, he says, Karl Marx would hardly recognize his manifesto. "In it's original form, it's long been dead," said Service.

There is no shortage of advice in the United States about how the Obama administration should approach Egypt. The familiar ring of policy prescriptions bouncing around the Beltway and beyond is either a testament to a lack of creativity or limited leverage or the return of some version of the political order that prevailed under Mubarak. Take, for example, Saturday’s lead editorial in the Washington Post called, “The U.S. Must Confront the Egyptian Military’s Push for Authoritarian Rule.”

Martin Luther King Jr. once said: “If a man hasn’t discovered something he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.” Nelson Mandela was a man who cherished the ideal of a free society all his life, an ideal that, as he proclaimed at his trial in Pretoria in April 1964, he hoped to live for, but if need be, die for.