Since late 2010, the Arab world has entered a tumultuous period of change, with populations demanding more inclusive and accountable government. The region is characterised by weak political institutions, which exclude large proportions of their populations from political representation and government services. Building on work in political science and economics, we assess the extent to which the quality of governance, or the extent of electoral democracy, relates to adult, infant, and maternal mortality, and to the perceived accessibility and improvement of health services. We compiled a dataset from the World Bank, WHO, Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Arab Barometer Survey, and other sources to measure changes in demographics, health status, and governance in the Arab World from 1980 to 2010. We suggest an association between more effective government and average reductions in mortality in this period; however, there does not seem to be any relation between the extent of democracy and mortality reductions. The movements for changing governance in the region threaten access to services in the short term, forcing migration and increasing the vulnerability of some populations. In view of the patterns observed in the available data, and the published literature, we suggest that efforts to improve government effectiveness and to reduce corruption are more plausibly linked to population health improvements than are efforts to democratise. However, these patterns are based on restricted mortality data, leaving out subjective health metrics, quality of life, and disease-specific data. To better guide efforts to transform political and economic institutions, more data are needed for healthcare access, health-care quality, health status, and access to services of marginalised groups.

Qatar has become an Arab country with a high international profile and an ambitious foreign policy, particularly as a result of its role in the Arab Spring. It has cultivated a reputation as a political mediator and a key source of foreign aid. Following the Libyan uprising, Qatar demonstrated further political adaptability in leading regional action against the Gaddafi regime. However, this foreign policy does not appear to be built on long‐term planning, but rather seems centred on opportunism and promiscuity as Qatar engages with multiple, often clashing, actors and plays the role of political maverick in the Middle East. This article assesses the key components of Qatari foreign policy, as well as public diplomacy, highlighting the potential implications of the lack of a coherent foreign strategy for the country, both on the domestic and external fronts. Domestically, Qatar faces increasing pressure for reform and the prospect of instability, both catalyzed by high centralization of decision‐making with regard to Qatari policy. Externally, it risks overextending its network of political partners to involve potentially volatile actors, losing the credibility of its public diplomacy messages, and subsequently, international scepticism towards its foreign policy motives. Those domestic and external factors highlight the limits of relying on pragmatism in Qatari foreign policy and the need for long‐term strategy if Qatar is to maintain its leadership role in the Middle East.

Numerous examples of temporal reasoning involve a process of abstraction from the number of times an event is to occur or the number of times events stand in a temporal relation. For example, scheduling a recurring evenf such as one's office hours may consider things like the relative temporal ordering of the ofice hours and anumber of other events in a given work day. The number of times office hours will actually be held may be unknown, even irrelevant.at the time of scheduling them. The objective of this article is to formulate a domain-independent framework for reasoning about recurring events and their relations. To achieve this end, we propose an ontology of recurrence based on the model-theoretic structure underlying collective predication using plural noun phrases. We offer a calculus of binary temporal relations for temporal collections based on a well-defined transformation of interval temporal relations into recurrence relations. Finally, we describe a reasoning framework based on manipulating knowledge stored in temporal relation nerworks, which is in turn a specialization of the CSP (constraint satisfaction problem) framework. The reasoner manipulates recurrence relations in the network to determine the network's consistency or to generate scenarios.The work here is motivated by the observation that many applications of temporal reasoning seem to require manipulation of recurring events. This section provides examples from scheduling, planning, and managing temporal data for illustration.First, consider a scheduling problem. In certain domains such as telescope observation scheduling (Drummond et al. 1994), an effective scheduler should be responsive to the tendency for a schedule to "break" during execution. Breakage is due to the temporal uncertainty of the initial knowledge about the durations of events to be scheduled. This uncertainty can be measured in terms of statistical data that characterize the mean and standard deviation of the duration of each event. These data are generated from observations of repeated executions of the events. Hence the effective scheduling and rescheduling of future events (as a result of schedule failure during execution) requires a representation and manipulation of recurring events.More generally, planning and scheduling tasks might involve constraints in which the number and even the ordering of the events are unspecified. For example, consider the constraint on a schedule imposed by the sentence Office hours should be held once a week on teaching days, preferably before the hour one's classes begin to meet. A schedule satisfying this constraint will be an assignment to recurring events (classes, office hours), the number of which may be unknown. Furthermore, from the information specified in the sentence All classes are held in the morning it is possible to infer, again with no knowledge of the number of events involved, the proposition expressed by Office hours will always be held in the morning. A formal characterization of the temporal entity assigned to thes...

The internet is enabling new approaches to public diplomacy. The US Digital Outreach Team (DOT) is one such initiative, aiming to engage directly with citizens in the Middle East by posting messages about US foreign policy on internet forums. This case study assesses the DOT's work. Does this method provide a promising move towards a more interactive and individualized approach to connecting with the Middle East? What are the strategic challenges faced by “public diplomacy 2.0?”

No abstract