Day by day, it seems the world is watching the situation in Syria deteriorate, especially after a massacre in Houla over the weekend that left more than 100 people dead, half of them children.

Fareed Zakaria spoke recently with CNN's John King about the international efforts to stop the violence and what options President Obama has. FULL POST

In Syria, the brutal regime of Bashar Assad is testing the proposition that repression works. The massacre of civilians in Houla is only the latest example of what appears to be a strategy of making no concessions and using maximum force. To the Assad regime's way of thinking, Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Libya's Muammar Gaddafi erred by hesitating, emboldening the opposition and sowing doubts among their supporters. So far, Assad's strategy has worked. Kofi Annan's mission, which appears to be based on the idea that Assad will negotiate his own departure, seems utterly doomed. The U.S., the Western world, indeed the civilized world, should attempt instead to dislodge the Assad regime. Is there a smart way to do it?

Read more from Fareed Zakaria at TIME and check out past TIME columns

Editor's Note: Soner Cagaptay is a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a GPS contributor. You can find all his blog posts here. Tyler Evans is a research assistant at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Soner Cagaptay and Tyler Evans.

By Soner Cagaptay and Tyler Evans, Special to CNN

Soner Cagaptay

Thursday marks the two-year anniversary of the 2010 flotilla incident, a crisis on the high seas that triggered a tailspin in Turkish-Israeli relations.

In the aftermath of the incident, Turkey recalled its ambassador and demanded an apology from Israel as well as reparations for the nine slain activists. Ankara even announced that its warships would escort future missions to Gaza.

Attempts to mend fences have stalled over the issue of an Israeli apology. With Turkey willing to accept nothing less than a full apology, and Israel for the moment unwilling to accommodate this demand, the two sides seem to be at an impasse.

Yet below the surface, not all is grim in Turkish-Israeli relations. Remarkably, economic ties have been flourishing between the two countries.

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Dr. Muhammad Ali Pate is Minister of State for Health in Nigeria. Dr. Christopher Elias is president of Global Development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Pate and Elias.

By Drs. Muhammad Ali Pate and Christopher Elias

The two of us are roughly the same age but we grew up in very different parts of the world. One of us had the luxury of never giving polio a second thought. The other saw his best friend paralyzed by the disease and, some years later, killed by a car as he struggled to cross the street.

It’s a tragic story of the inequities that separate rich countries like the United States from developing countries such as Nigeria. But it's also a hopeful story as progress on polio eradication is made.

In less than a quarter century, the number of children paralyzed by polio has dropped spectacularly — from 350,000 cases annually to just 650 last year. In 1988, there were 125 countries where polio was endemic. Today, there are just three - Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan. FULL POST

Editor's note: Clyde Prestowitz writes on globalization for ForeignPolicy.com and is president of the Economic Strategy Institute. John Prout is the former Paris-based treasurer of Credit Commercial de France.

By Clyde Prestowitz and John Prout, Special to CNN

With Greece probably heading for an exit from the euro, the European and global economies may be facing disaster. However, there is still time for European leaders to reverse this destructive dynamic with one simple, outside-the-box solution: Instead of pushing Greece out of the eurozone, Germany should voluntarily withdraw and reissue its beloved deutsche mark.

The analysis of the problems of the euro and the European Union has long been upside down, focused on the debt and competitive weaknesses of the so-called peripheral countries (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Ireland) and especially of Greece. But issues of debt and competitiveness existed and were dealt with rather easily long before the euro arrived, through periodic devaluation of the currencies of the less-competitive countries against those of the more competitive countries, and especially against the deutsche mark.

Read on here.

By Tim Lister, CNN

Amid growing outrage over civilian casualties in Syria, there are ever more urgent calls to aid — or at least protect — the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad. But so far, the international community's response has been limited.

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They are questions asked many times since the Syria violence began: When will it stop? What can the U.S. and international community do? What options are left?

Stephen Hadley, former White House national security adviser for George W. Bush and now a senior adviser for the U.S. Institute of Peace, weighs in. FULL POST

By Fareed Zakaria

A bold proposal recently caught my eye: One of Moscow's top academics says Russia should build a new capital city. This city would be far, far away from Moscow, 4,000 miles to be exact — in Vladivostok.

Why?

Well, the person who proposed the idea, Sergei Karaganov of Moscow's Higher School of Economics, wrote in a state-run newspaper that a capital in the far east would make Russia part of what he calls "the rising world" — closer to dynamic Asian economies and further away from an aging Europe.

The idea of moving a capital is not without precedent. FULL POST

By Kyle Almond, CNN

Egypt’s presidential race is headed for a runoff, but the two remaining candidates present voters with a serious dilemma, according to some analysts.

Sonya Farid, writing for Al Arabiya, said the two candidates who reached the runoff — Mohamed Morsi and Ahmed Shafik — are the most non-revolutionary of all the candidates and represent “two typically tyrannical institutions: the first (Morsi) being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the second (Shafik) a senior official of the former regime.”

Shafik was the last prime minister of former President Hosni Mubarak, who was forced out by protests in February 2011. Shafik received 5.5 million of the country’s 23 million votes, about 200,000 votes behind first-place finisher Morsi, who leads the Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Voters must now choose between “a return to the old corrupt tyrannical regime or a complete transformation into a seemingly unfavorable scenario that would give the (Muslim) Brotherhood a trifecta of both parliamentary houses and the presidency,” wrote Adel Iskandar, a columnist for the Egypt Independent.

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Watch "Fareed Zakaria GPS" Sunday at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET.

There is much speculation these days about power struggles in China in the wake of the ouster of Bo Xilai, the powerful party boss of Chongqing.

China's political system will surely be tested but in the short run, its leaders may have dodged a bullet.

Bo Xilai was a charismatic, Machiavellian leader, who used populism, money, and power to build a political base.

Had he not been brought down – by a series of mistakes, revelations, and bad luck for him – he might well have altered the nature of the technocratic system that now runs China.

In the short run, China might well survive its political crisis. But it faces a more immediate challenge: an economic crisis.

Watch the video above for more about China's economic future or read more in my column at the Washington Post.