FAO today issued a special alert on the food security situation in Syria, voicing serious concern over the state of food security, especially for vulnerable groups, because of continued civil unrest since March 2011.

By Marc Lynch,

The  Top 100 Global Thinkers List -- or as I like to call it, the "Blake Hounshell makes 100 Friends and Loses a Few Thousand Who Secretly Think They Should Have Been On It List" -- hit the stands today. As you'd expect, given this year's astonishing events, the Middle East features prominently. My contribution was an article, The Big Think Behind the Arab Spring, which reviewed of some of the key ideas, thinkers, and trends which contributed to the Arab uprisings. I tried to focus on what Arab intellectuals and writers have said about their own revolutions, not on what we in the West have written about them. I can't blame Blake for that one.