Smart Reads October 17, 2013

♦ US Budget Deal: here are the details on the deal that was made. Ed Luce considers how the Republican party’s brinkmanship has squandered so much in such a short time and achieved nothing . The New Yorker has ten neat takeaways from the GOP cave-in. It seemed that despite the Senate being dominated by men, women in both parties were the driving force behind negotiations and compromises.
♦ Hassan Rouhani seeks to counter the commercial reach of the Revolutionary Guards as his government attempts to revive the economy and break free from international sanctions.
♦ Yevgeny Roizman’s victory in the Yekaterinburg mayoral election was a blow to the Kremlin, but he is keeping a low profile, aware of the price paid by previous opponents.
♦ Foreign Policy looks at Syrian refugees’ harrowing experiences of trying to get to Sweden and ending up in an Egyptian jail.
♦ Steven A. Cook at the CFR looks at why “Egypt has reached the stage where, despite a roadmap for reconstituting an electoral political order, the goal remains for one group or another to impose its political will on the others, just as it has been since February 2011.”