World
03/16/08 -
Mesh - Turkey’s democracy has long rested on a delicate equilibrium between the guardians of the unitary secular-nationalist paradigm who dominate the civilian and military state bureaucracies on the one hand, and the populist politicians who appeal to the particularistic sub-identities of Turkey’s diverse civil society on the other. The proper functioning of this dynamic depends on the quality of...
03/16/08 -
the monkey cage - While the paper is still a work in progress, I worry that this is one of those cases where game theorists reach confident conclusions on the basis of ceteris paribus conditions, where the ceteris are anything but paribus if you look at them closely. Entirely apart from the ethical implications (which he seems interested in exploring in future iterations of the piece), the conclusion that profiling...
03/16/08 -
rconversation - The Chinese system of Internet censorship and media propaganda may have a lot of holes, but when tested by events like the Tibet unrest this past week, so far it's holding up well enough for the regime's purposes....
03/14/08 -
Christopher McGuinness - We heard these words after Serbia, Rwanda, and Somalia. In fact, we’ve heard them repeated after nearly every war, genocide, or other type of humanitarian crisis in recent memory....
03/14/08 -
EI Diaries - Respected Israeli professor Ilan Pappe has said that genocide "is the only appropriate way to describe what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip". Genocide is not a word most people use lightly. But words laden with meaning have been used often, where Gaza is concerned, of late....
03/14/08 -
Metro Collective - Iraqis have been fleeing their homes en masse. As displaced victims of war are forced to seek refuge in other parts of Iraq or in neighboring nations, they have turned into a number: 4.9 million unnamed, anonymous non-entities, statistically relevant yet individually insignificant. ...
03/13/08 -
Desi Critics - Food prices have been going through the roof in Pakistan since November, 2007, with long queues in front of fair price shops being turned away owing to shortage of flour. At a time when the Rabi crop harvesting in Sindh has started, which should bring down prices, procurement prices are skyrocketing instead. There has been a decline in wheat-sown acreage, fertilizer off take has reduced and 22 %...
03/13/08 -
East Africa Forum - Lots of people get upset about asylum seekers. “They’re after our health service they’re economic migrants they’re rich enough to pay people-smugglers they’re potential terrorists.” But who are they really? According to the Home Office, in 2006, the latest full year available, 10% of asylum seekers to the UK (2400 people) came from Afghanistan, with 2375 people from Iran; there are...
03/13/08 -
The Long War Journal - The search for Mosul’s kidnapped Chaldean Catholic Archbishop has met a tragic ending. After a two week search by Iraqi and US forces stationed in Mosul, the body of Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was found dead inside the city limits. Iraqi interpreters assigned to the 4th Brigade of the 2nd Iraqi Army Division confirmed Rahho’s body was found in Mosul....
03/13/08 -
Whirledview - An air of jubilation greeted the results of the recent parliamentary elections in Pakistan. The count showed that the President’s party of opportunists (Muslim League-Quaid) had been reduced to a minority, assuming that the Pakistan People’s Party and the remains of the real Pakistan Muslim League can form a workable coalition government, as they have pledged to do....
03/13/08 -
Suhaib Webb - I had the opportunity to meet some French sisters who are now here with me in Cairo, and we got to talking about the issue of Islam in Europe. It was actually really sad, hard to hold the tears as one sister (from Holland, convert to Islam) told her own story of how she would remove her scarf everyday when she entered work, so she would be left to wear only an allowed small headband just covering...
03/13/08 -
ICT4PEACE - To denounce government censorship of the Internet and to demand more online freedom, Reporters Without Borders is calling on Internet users to come and protest in online versions of nine countries that are Internet enemies during the 24 hours from 11 a.m. tomorrow, 12 March, to 11 a.m. on 13 March (Paris time, GMT +1). ...
03/12/08 -
Green Leap Forward - The central government, with Pan Yue (??) of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) as its fearless green leader, has enacted a cyclone of green policies dubbed the “Green Whirlwinds”, coinciding with the “peaceful rise” of SEPA to a ministry-level administrative organ. Here’s a brief summary of the green credit, green insurance, green securities and green trade...
03/12/08 -
Steve en Ulrike - Today we see how the real situation is in Tibet. The day seems to be silent and peacefull, even boring. Until 6 o´clock. then 100s of Tibetans gather together on the Bakhor Square. They form a strong, silent, peacefull circle around the police who keep the middle of the square open. Soon they call for backup....
03/12/08 -
American Thinker - From the Egyptian border breach to indiscriminate rocket fire at Israel, the Gaza Strip currently poses serious threats to regional security. The Hamas terrorist organization controls this territory because it defeated the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in a six-day Palestinian civil war in June 2007....
03/12/08 -
Crownmeking81 - I can't think of a better start to my day then to read about an individual who decides to stand up to the status quo and put themselves on the line for freedom and equality. This woman, Wajeha Al-Huwaider, has posted a video of herself driving a car in Saudi Arabia on YouTube, which is a clear violation of Saudi law. Today is Women's Day in Saudi Arabia, and she has taken this occasion to beseech...
03/12/08 -
Impunity Watch - The trial of former Croatian generals Ante Gotovina, Ivan Cermak, and Mladen Markac began at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal today. The three generals stand accused of orchestrating the killing of hundreds of Serbians and the forced expulsion of thousands during a three-day military campaign to retake Krajina in August 1995, known as "Operation Storm." All three have pled not guilty to accusations...
03/12/08 -
Boycott 2008 Communist Olympics - I believe that the Olympic Games in Beijing will be hugely successful and absolutely trouble-free. The reason I say that is because China is working like crazy to iron out a few rough spots, because I'm an optimistic person and because I don't want to be identified by Chinese officials as a bad guy and have my media village pillow-mint privileges suspended this August....
03/11/08 -
Hot Air - The city of Lahore has a reputation as the cultural center of Pakistan, and until recently, even the jihadists had left it alone. Now, no city in Pakistan can consider itself safe, as two suicide bombers blew up a house and a police headquarters there today, killing 24 and wounding more than 200:...
03/11/08 -
Gay Solidarity - Two Iranian citizens will probably get send back to Iran, even though there life will be in danger if they arrive in their country. Mehdi Kazemi, only 19 years old, recently found out that his partner was executed because of his sexual orientation. Kazemi was studying in London at that time, and besides the horrible news of the death of his partner, he was told that he was on the black list now as...
03/11/08 -
Moneyweb - How can you tell the difference between South Africa and the US of A? New York governor Eliot Spitzer has found himself embroiled in a scandal; apparently he was Client 9 of a high-end prostitution syndicate (see Spitzer engulfed in sex scandal)....
03/10/08 -
Gulf Stream Blues - News came this morning of two big election results in Europe, both won by the slimmest of margins and both reflecting the increasingly polarized nature of their societies. In the first, Malta’s ruling Nationalist party won the weekend’s general election by the slimmest margin in the Mediterranean state’s 40 year history....
03/10/08 -
Siberian Light - In late February it was discovered that India and USA have begun consultation at the high level about question of cooperation in the area of ballistic missile defence. According to a statement by Robert Gates, US Secretary of State for Defense, the question was about US participation in the development of an Indian ballistic missile defence system....
03/10/08 -
My Virtual Tent - Now that the diplomatic crisis in the Andes is over, it’s time for some analysis: what did it all mean? Well, many things. Let’s start from the beginning. Why did Ecuador get ticked off? - Last weekend, Colombian military forces entered Ecuadorian territory in order to kill a prominent member of the Colombian guerrilla organisation FARC, Raúl Reyes, in the border region....
03/09/08 -
FP Watch - One of Putin's major selling points -- and that of his successor, Dmitri Medvedev -- has been the impressive rates of economic growth that have occurred on his watch. In no small measure, these economic successes have helped to bolster Putin's public approval rating to 70-80%, and ensure an easy victory for his party in last year's Duma elections. But most of this boasting is just hot air, with...
03/09/08 -
Eurozone Watch - Last weeks' news about the Eurogroup meeting and the ECB Board meeting revealed a clear rift between the political leaderships in the eurozone and the European Central Bank. For the first time since the euro started its race for ever new historical heights, all Finance Ministers of the Eurozone agreed to voice unanimous and strong concern about this development. Previously, at least the German...
03/09/08 -
Crispin Williams - A feeling of desperation is the only way to sum up the latest episode of clashes between Israel and the Palestinians. Following the latest Israeli incursion into Gaza to suppress rocket fire that had killed 1 Israeli citizen and 2 Israeli soldiers, 120 Palestinians lay dead. Approximately half of these were civilians, with one being a baby girl. Seeming retribution followed in a gun attack on...
03/07/08 -
Contextual Criticism - Nobody seems to know exactly how many Christians there are in Iraq -- I've seen figures ranging from 550,000 to 750,000. It's probably somewhere in between. They are a small percentage of the population, however, maybe two or two and a half percent....
03/07/08 -
Douglas Farah - Viktor Bout, the subject of my book with Steve Braun has been arrested in Thailand on charges of supplying weapons to the FARC in Colombia. It is a stunning blow to the world’s “Merchant of Death,” who has been responsible for fanning wars across Africa, as well as aiding and abetting the Taliban, and thus, indirectly, al Qaeda....
03/07/08 -
Byzantine Sacred Art Blog - It is no longer a secret that unilateral declaration of independence by the Pristina separatists and subsequent lightening-quick illegal recognition of Serbia's severed Kosovo-Metohia province by Washington, Brussels, Berlin, Paris, London et al has, as predicted, opened the Pandora's Box of secessionists seeking recognitions for their own self-proclaimed turfs, within other internationally recognized...
03/06/08 -
EU Referendum - There is a sort of a joke about political, social and academic meetings to do with Balkan countries and regions that all you have to say is “Macedonia. What do you think?” to start a fracas that may well lead to fisticuffs....
03/06/08 -
Siberian Light - Dmitry Medvedev is Russia’s new President. But what kind of President will he be? Will he wield actual power, or will he just be the right hand man of outgoing President Vladimir Putin? Does the Bear have the stamina to survive in the bear-pit of Russian politics?...
03/06/08 -
Opalo's Weblog - The official opening of Kenya’s tenth parliament took place on Thursday afternoon amid high expectations of national reconciliation and healing. The president’s speech laid emphasis on the need to urgently amend the constitution in order to create the constitutional framework for the implementation of the deal that he signed a week ago with arch-rival Raila Odinga (It is important to note that...
03/05/08 -
Kabobfest - Things are getting back to normal in Gaza after Israel decided to pause its Shoah while Condoleeza Rice visits the region and blames the Palestinians for the 125 deaths they suffered at the hands of Israel’s army this week. By normal I mean that Israeli airstrikes killed three Palestinians today....
03/05/08 -
Caracas Chronicles - Venezuelan President Chávez recently announced that he was deploying thousands of soldiers to the border after Colombia bombed a FARC base in Ecuadorian territory. His government also announced the land border would be closed to all traffic, and expelled all Colombian Embassy officials while it announced it was bringing home all personnel from the Venezuelan Embassy in Colombia....
03/05/08 -
Eurozone Watch - While the German government and German economists do not even dare seriously thinking about economic stimulus packages (with some rare exceptions - see Ulrich Fritsche's post), some other European countries are moving quickly ahead. In most crisis scenarios for European countries with real estate bubbles to burst such as Spain or the Baltics, economists now argue that the downturn will not be...
03/04/08 -
Windows to Russia - Like we reported the Russian elections were given a clean bill of health and even though they may not have been too exciting! They cost much less than the 3/4 of a Billion Dollars that the American elections have spent so far! The people are happy, government is happy & Putin is happy! (Not sure if Medvedev is happy yet) Russia's presidential elections were held in line with international standards,...
03/04/08 -
Justice for All - Feb 26th, 2008, Reuters reported, “YouTube outage might have been caused by Pakistan.” The same night, news of YouTube being shut down was discussed on every major network, speculating whether the Pakistani government was responsible. YouTube executives didn’t call it censorship, explaining the shutdown was the result of a routing change creating a massive traffic jam and “many users around...
03/04/08 -
boinboing - The Question Box is a project from UC Berkeley's Rose Shuman to bring some of the benefits of the information on the Internet to places that are too remote or poor to sustain a live Internet link. It works by installing a single-button intercom in the village that is linked to a nearby town where there is a computer with a trained, live operator. Questioners press the intercom, describe their query...
03/03/08 -
china economic review - Beijing’s attempts to rein in bank lending have focused in part on stemming the flow of money into real estate developments. The problem here is not so much the large-scale, listed developers that have long-term strategies and increasingly diversified portfolios; it is the smaller and less reliable players....
03/03/08 -
John Esposito - The politicization of scholars, experts and media commentators post 9/11 has created a minefield for policymakers and the general public. Many are caught between the contending positions of seemingly qualified experts as well as a new cadre of Islamophobic authors and their revisionist readings of Islam and Islamic history. Today, we now have a new empirically grounded tool that enables us to go...
03/03/08 -
Dexter Thillien - Firstly there is a personality clash between Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy. For the Germans, Sarkozy is seen as too much in the public eye while Merkel has a much more discreet persona, but what hasn’t especially been liked, and not just by the Germans, has been the fact that Sarkozy has been taking EU success as his own, especially in the case of the Lisbon Treaty or the release of the...
03/02/08 -
terror wonk - Reyes, who’s birth name was Luis Edgar Devia Silva, was the FARC’s chief ideologue and voice to the outside world. He was the first member of the FARC secretariat to be killed. The internal affairs of the FARC are opaque, but Reyes was frequently described as the number two in the FARC hierarchy after Manuel Marulanda, who is in his late 70s and is rumored to be ill. In the FARC’s hierarchy...
03/02/08 -
Tarek Rizk - It was this bit of branding talk that draw me in, and I wish now my eye had kept moving. Cohen anecdotally concludes that a lack European enthusiasm for the NATO mission is somehow traceable to their short memory and a shocking disregard for the impact of the London and Madrid bombings. The European governments are understandably unenthusiastic about cleaning up the mess left behind when the US took...
03/02/08 -
FP Watch - The Syrian town along the border, Qunetra, is a wasteland. No one lives there. Instead, the Syrians have largely left it unchanged since the Israelis destroyed it in 1967. Houses are down, buildings have huge holes in them, and the place is eerily quiet. When I requested to visit the city, I was treated with intense suspicion and only able to...
02/29/08 -
Janet Ritz - A year ago, a friend who'd heard that I'd spent time with the Kurds asked me, 'who are they?' That query led to this post. After reading Blake Fleetwood's post with Bill Clinton's statement regarding the need for troops in the Kurdish north because Turkey doesn't "like the fact that the PKK guerrillas sometimes come across into northern Iraq and hide after staging attacks in Turkey" and the news...
02/29/08 -
Tim Worstall - A tiny story that most newspapers would bury below the fold on B17 has an interesting, if uncomfortable message for trade protectionists. Chinese trade with Europe is about to be revolutionized by the rebirth of the old overland silk route - this time via rail....
02/29/08 -
infowars - Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai has provoked outrage after threatening Palestinians with a "holocaust." Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai has provoked outrage after threatening Palestinians with a "holocaust," but the same media who obsessed about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s "wipe Israel off the map" misquote are scurrying to defend Vilnai’s disgraceful...
02/28/08 -
avuncular american - "Downhill" in the West Bank is usually the direction that Israeli settlers look. They - along with Israeli Army outposts - occupy the high ground, and increasingly, the preponderance of the territory's water resources. Essa and Snowdon start out with a scene filmed through their car's windshield, driving through a welcome West Bank rain. But they point out that even the raindrops do not belong...
02/28/08 -
Steven M. Warshawsky - A few days ago, John McCain remarked to reporters that to win the upcoming election, he must convince the American people that the current strategy in Iraq is succeeding. If he can't do this, he admitted, "then I lose. I lose." While McCain quickly backed away from his stark political analysis, he conceded that the war "will be a significant factor in how the American people judge my candidacy."...
02/28/08 -
Counterterrorism Blog - A few weeks ago while conducting research for a client; I came across a newspaper article from Toronto that immediately caught my attention. It reported the arrest of four men on charges of debit and credit card fraud for possessing numerous gift cards containing bank account and debit information from individuals in the United Kingdom (U.K.). Further investigation found laptop computers and memory...
02/27/08 -
Eurozone Watch - Just coming back from a short holiday in Spain, I am now more confident than ever that the Iberian economy is heading for a nasty period of adjustment. Even though growth in Q4 of last year surprised on the upside (0.8 percent quarter-on-quarter compared to 0.4 percent in the euro area as a whole), it already feels like a recession in Spain. Unemployment has risen by about half a percentage point...
02/27/08 -
notboss - Just as there are no free lunches, there are no truly free markets. Any vendor who buys you lunch or participates in a market is always looking for an advantage. Competition makes markets the vibrant and innovative places we want them to be. But paradoxically, when competitors succeed in developing competitive advantages they start to threaten market openness and competition. In software markets,...
02/27/08 -
Shashank Bengali - It was nice to see former Secretary-General Kofi Annan this morning at a press conference in Nairobi. Annan (at right in a Reuters photo) looked sharp as usual, in a charcoal suit and crimson tie. Most importantly, he didn't look tired, which means that maybe he's not quite ready to leave Kenya yet. Because it's starting to seem like his presence is one of the few things keeping this place from...
02/26/08 -
Hannah Allam - Broadly, the polls have been described as a referendum on the popularity of President Ahmadinejad, whose administration has been marked by U.S.-led concern over Iran's nuclear program, prisoner abuse allegations, the closure of independent media outlets, a crackdown on citizens who don't strictly observe Islamic dress, the arrests of Iranian-American intellectuals on suspicion of espionage, and,...
02/26/08 -
Mustafa Akyol - It is striking to hear this comment especially these days, because “the Islamists” that have been “kept in check by a modern elite” for decades have just taken a few more bold steps to make Turkey a liberal democracy. The members of the “Islamist” AKP (Justice and Development Party) have just passed the Foundations law, which gives our non-Muslim minorities the rights that the Turkish...
02/26/08 -
Andrew Sullivan - That's all. Yes: almost everything remains to be done. Note also the Bush-like tendency to reduce the most intractable questions - questions that have never, ever been resolved in centuries - to simple topic sentences, as if writing these goals on a piece of paper makes them any less delusional. "Resolve the 'federalism' issue through peaceful referendums." Okay. "Develop truly capable Iraqi Army."...
02/26/08 -
pajamasmedia - In 1991, as the Balkans were disintegrating, the then-Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, Jacques Poos, proclaimed: “This is the hour of Europe. It is not the hour of the Americans.” It was (presumably) his way of saying that European governments had a responsibility to intervene in a crisis that threatened the stability of Europe. But Europeans, paralyzed by their divisions, were unable to...
02/26/08 -
poligazette - tories about North Korea usually focus on its nuclear program. But Perhaps they should start focusing more on what we will do when the place falls apart.To be sure, the nuclear program is a huge part of the problem. A collapse of the government in North Korea would potentially release onto the international black market vast quantities of nuclear technology, at a primitive but nonetheless deadly...
02/26/08 -
Pharmalot - As Bangkok’s newly installed government reviews the policy to issue compulsory licenses for several widely used medications, Gretchen Hamel, a spokeswoman for the US Trade Rep says the office is, indeed, taking a close look at Thailand’s actions. The move comes after reports that drugmakers and biotechs have been urging the US Trade Rep to downgrade Thailand’s status. “We are disappointed...
02/24/08 -
All Things Pakistan - Much has been said on how the election results are a referendum against the policies of General Musharraf. While there can be little disagreement with this, there is a clear lesson for Pakistan’s urban intelligentsia that had been screaming about the futility of this election. True, Pakistan’s troubled polity will not transform overnight, nor will the endemic civil-military imbalance dissipate...
02/22/08 -
Sabrina Workman - The reasoning behind the last fuel tax increase was that it ’sent the right environmental signals in our fight against climate change’. Climate change is used to justify various policies that usually involve saving money or creating extra money for the government or local councils, such as the reduction of rubbish bin pick-ups in some local councils to alternating weeks for recycling and ordinary...
02/22/08 -
Steve LeVine - When it comes to oligarchs, Vladimir Putin is a choosy ruler. He likes some, he hates some, and sometimes an oligarch can move from one to the other category with some dispatch. So was the fate of Mikhail Gutseriev, who until recently was head of a Russian oil company called Russneft. Putin decided that he wanted one of his favored oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska, to take over the company. Gutseriev...
02/22/08 -
Brad Sester - And, more broadly, can China sustain a gradual pace of RMB appreciation? Or even a a gradual pace of appreciation against basket, not just the dollar, as Li Yang has suggested? Or does an expected , gradual appreciation invite unlimited inflows and thus pose impossible-to-solve problems for a "stretched" central bank, leaving only one way out -- a large one-off revaluation?...
02/21/08 -
immanent Frame - In Turkey, the recent parliamentary vote put an end to the headscarf ban, but not to the public controversy that has severely divided and deeply polarized Turkish society since the post-1980 period. The battle in the public sphere continues among groups with different interpretations of secularism, but also among women themselves. As the most visible symbol of Islamization for the last three decades,...
02/21/08 -
John Quiggin - Most long-lived dictatorships have at least some positive achievements, and, the world being what it is, most dictators have some unattractive enemies. These facts have generated a couple of marathon threads here, following Chris post’ on Castro and mine on Suharto** , not to mention vast numbers on Saddam. Then there’s Algeria and Pakistan, where dictatorial governments have had plenty of...
02/21/08 -
Globalization Blog - Much is made, and rightly so, of the way in which the currently poor economies lack the technology of the richer ones. Sometimes referred to as the Digital Divide, this technological gap is hugely important: for of course, it is technological advance that enables the growth out of poverty. If we define technology widely (including methods of organisation etc) then the application of technology is...
02/21/08 -
Daniel Duquenal - Today there are a few recent articles worth noting in El Universal. The first one tells us that the very own government numbers speak of a 0.2% growth in the agricultural PIB for 2005-2006. This at a time where the economy was growing by a 10%, courtesy of the import boom due to high oil prices. That is, as it has been pointed out often enough in this page, the economy grew because imports grew and...
02/21/08 -
the monkey cage - In case you don’t know about the Freedom House ratings, here’s a little background. Every year since 1972, Freedom House has issued an annual report on the global status of democracy. In a nutshell, every country is categorized annually as “free,” “partially free,” or “not free,” depending on where it stands on the two dimensions of political rights and civil liberties. (These...
02/21/08 -
John Rosenthal - Municipal elections are upcoming in France in the next weeks. A front-page headline on the subject in the weekend edition (Feb. 17-18) of the daily Le Monde would undoubtedly shock many readers of traditional English-language new sources. "Municipal Elections," it reads, "Banlieues on the Right, Downtown on the Left." Banlieues on the Right? The very word "banlieues" became widely-known to English...
02/20/08 -
spying bad things - In 2005 the Indonesian government confirmed in principle approval for four 1000 MWe units on the Muria peninsula, 450 km east of Jakarta in central Java, with a view to commissioning the first in 2016 and the last in 2025. The Indonesian Government made an earlier attempt (in 1995) to commence a reactor program in Muria but shelved these plans due to public environmental opposition and the Asian...
02/20/08 -
Hannah Lucinda Smith - So it’s finally happened: 11 years after ethnic tension exploded into ethnic conflict and cleansing, 9 years after the UN intervened to keep the peace, Kosovo has become an independent nation state. There was jubilation on the streets of Pristina following Prime Minister Hashim Thaci’s long awaited announcement; a stark contrast to the angry Serbian crowds who threw rocks at the American Embassy...
02/20/08 -
Shashank Bengali - The Rwandan capital is home to about 1 million people but it has the feel of a small town, with orderly, tree-lined streets that meet at intersections where drivers use their turn signals more than their horns. The guys hawking cell phone airtime run up to you and wave the scratch cards in your face, but they plead for a sale with their eyes, not their lungs....
02/19/08 -
Russia Blog - While President Putin has been a harsh critic of the war in Iraq and U.S. plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, he has steadfastly refused to criticize President Bush's competence or good faith. Speaking about the current occupant of the White House, Putin said, "Sometimes you have to make decisions that nobody else can make...do you think Bush has it easy?" A reporter asked...
02/19/08 -
Opinio Juris - It takes little courage to be a blogger in the United States. Perhaps professional reputation is at risk if things go badly, but there is little more to fear than that. Sure, every intellectual community has its village idiot, and the blogosphere is one of the easiest places to find people who crave attention and lack discretion. But the rashness of a buffoon hardly qualifies as courage. I suppose...
02/19/08 -
concurring opinions - First, the moral authority question. The charged Rwandans were not responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide (Hutus killing Tutsis), but for acts by Tutsi-led rebels who defeated the Hutu extremists responsible for the genocide. Certainly, these soldiers should be held responsible for violations of international criminal law in their efforts to end the overwhelming violence perpetrated in Rwanda --...
02/18/08 -
Counterterrorism Blog - The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) is actually a misnomer. It does not promote the sanctity of bank records as its name suggests. Rather, the statute enlists banks as the eyes and ears of the government in its efforts to prevent criminals from availing themselves of the civilized world’s financial system. It does this by defining the circumstances in which banks are required to report customer activity...
02/18/08 -
lawhawk - China is now complaining about a planned US mission to destroy a satellite that is schedule to reenter the Earth's atmosphere in early March before it could potentially expose people to a dangerous chemical on board (not to mention allow potentially sensitive US technology to fall to the Earth where it might be collected by enemies of the US). China carried out an anti-satellite missile test...
02/18/08 -
FP Watch - Yeltsin's government had tried to put an end to prisoner mistreatment. Yet the Putin administration, without directly authorizing it, has essentially adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" policy that allows for prison directors to quietly institutionalize such abuse. As the co-founder of the Foundation for Defense of Rights of Prisoners, Lev Ponomarev, has suggested: "...when Putin came to power, a new...
02/15/08 -
Crooked Timber - Given the vagueness of boundaries, the best definition I’ve been able to come up with is the following. Anyone who has a credible chance of being able to publish a single authored article in one of a small number of key journals qualifies as a member of the foreign policy community. The list of journals would certainly include Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy ; I think that there is a strong...
02/15/08 -
globalisation blog - Perhaps the most controversial part of globalisation is the bit about the freedom of movement of labour. Free movement of goods (despite some tariffs) and capital are pretty much the order of the day, to the enrichment of us all. But that free movement of labour still hasn't arrived, at least not globally. We have had such though within the European Union in recent years and there's been a...
02/15/08 -
Roger Kimball - What is it about the Brits and free speech? Why do they hate it so? They didn’t used to. But nowadays their libel laws muzzle domestic criticism of radical Islam and have even sought to muzzle American authors making such criticisms. The Archbishop of Canterbury thinks that Britain needs new laws to prevent “thoughtless and cruel” speech. Really? What about people, like His Grace, who advocate...
02/15/08 -
Daniel Duquenal - Chavez must start regretting a little bit his praise words toward the FARC. This is only resulting in an increased scrutiny of the FARC activities inside Venezuela by the press. And the Chavez administration is not looking good at all. In fact, in his latest article Juan Forero barely stops himself from accusing chavismo to be collaborating deliberately with the FARC business inside Venezuela. It...
02/15/08 -
randyelrod - Ugandan President Musveni was the first African leader to proclaim HIV/Aids a problem and therefore paved the way for funding. British tax funds provided seed money for the clinic and ongoing operation funds are provided by donors such as Compassion International. It is a Christian based clinic but is open to all. They currently have 10,000 active patients. All services are free and the current...
02/15/08 -
the whitepath - Turkey's own ?new class? is in power for a long time, and thus is more appropriately named nowadays as the ?old elite.? The things they label as ?counter-revolution? are nothing but the expansion of rights and freedoms. They love to depict their political opponents as ?traitors,? or, in the case of religious conservatives, as wild-eyed, Taliban-like fanatics. (This sometimes plays well to international...
02/13/08 -
FP Watch - Syria is engaged in a renewed crackdown on political dissent, culminating with the recent detention of Riad Seif (left), a prominent opposition leader. This won't be the first time that Seif's been in jail - in 2001, he and several other pro-democracy advocates were thrown into prison for five-year terms, effectively ending a period of political openness known as the "Damascus Spring." No doubt to...
02/13/08 -
China Law Blog - I do not think it a mistake for US companies to target China's elites, at least initially. I also do not think it a mistake for US companies to seek the high road both in terms of their image and in terms of the way they conduct business. If US companies cannot make it in China taking the high road, I have serious doubts they can make it by taking the low road. US companies need to use their strengths...
02/13/08 -
Robert O. Freedman - The government of Ehud Olmert has utilized a series of measures to try to stop the rocket fire. Olmert and his Defense Minister, Labor Party leader Ehud Barak, have regularly sent in army troops to hit Hamas and Islamic Jihad forces in Gaza near the Israeli border; it has used the Israeli Air Force to hit Palestinian teams firing rockets (or about to fire rockets, or returning from firing rockets);...
02/12/08 -
Michael Totten - The local police force would collapse in short order without American financial and logistics support. “The biggest problem they have is supply,” Corporal Hayes said to me in Fallujah. “They're always running out of gas and running out of bullets. How are they supposed to police this city with no gas and no bullets?” What they need more than anything else, though, in the long run anyway,...
02/12/08 -
Derek Barry - With former PM John Howard refusing to say sorry, Kevin Rudd made a public apology an election commitment. However the new Prime Minister had faced criticism for delaying the release of the text of the apology. His argument was he had to consult with Aboriginal group to make sure it was right. Opposition leader Brendan Nelson has confirmed the Coalition will give its bipartisan support to the apology...
02/12/08 -
Hannah Allam - In a place as diverse and cosmopolitan as Dubai -- home to about 180 nationalities -- English is the lingua franca. But it's not the English you hear on newscasts; this city-state has developed its own Persian Gulf patois that reflects the polyglot communities residing here. Dubai-speak is sprinkled with corporate jargon, South Asian inflections, guttural Russian, acronyms for everything, cheeky...
02/12/08 -
transatlantic politics - Romania's recent achievements are impressive. They include NATO membership in 2004, EU membership in 2007, and eight years of solid economic growth that have refashioned the country into a modern democracy and a market economy. Romania is a country of enormous promise and potential with a marketplace of 22 million consumers. It is rich in agricultural lands, energy and mineral resources, and human...
02/12/08 -
Econbrowser - Satellite O'er the Desert is produced by someone calling himself "Joules Burn" (who says scientists lack a sense of humor)? JB was inspired by the careful effort by Oil Drum's Stuart Staniford to sift through the limited information publicly available to try to ascertain the current production status of Ghawar, the world's greatest oil field, which in recent years has accounted for perhaps 6% of...
02/12/08 -
Social Europe Blog - The European Social Model (ESM) in its most basic sense is best understood as a Europe-wide shared political value and aspiration based on the notion of ecological and social sustainability. It acknowledges that the conservation of human livelihood and the protection from life risks – such as ill health, unemployment and old age – are indispensable requirements for a good society. The implementation...
02/10/08 -
immanent Frame - In Turkey there is now a great deal of controversy about proposed revisions to the constitution that would include lifting the ban on the wearing of Islamic headscarves in universities. Many commentators have taken this to be an ominous sign of the intention of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, who represent the Justice and Development Party (AKP), to undermine Turkey’s...
02/10/08 -
Dion Nissenbaum - Set aside for a moment the circuitous, overly cautious final report: Return once again to the days of the war. Recall the moments of anxiety, the sense of widening cracks, when it suddenly became clear to each and every one of us that the army may not always have the power to rescue us, that maybe once it could end differently. After all, this is what suddenly trickled between the tightly fastened...
02/10/08 -
Oil & glory - Iran is in the grip of an energy crisis that has left homes without heating and electricity, forced the temporary shut-down of power plants, and even led National Iranian Oil Co to stop re-injecting gas into its onshore oilfields. How could this happen in a country with the world's second-largest oil and gas reserves, you might ask? First, this year's winter has been the coldest in a half century;...
02/08/08 -
poligazette - Few individuals in Turkey or beyond lack an opinion about the AKP’s proposal to give young women attending university the legal right to wear head scarves in university facilities. The mere political progress made by this reform convinces many of the country’s secular citizens that their country is five years away from resembling Iran - a type of doomsday “back to the future” scenario...
02/08/08 -
Social Europe Blog - The French Presidency of the EU this year is a significant opportunity to resolve these important questions. Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed an updated European Security Strategy, and Britain must help shape what goes in it. Above all else, Brown and Miliband need to ensure that this strategy answers boldly the key question: 'when will EU military force be used?' A new strategy must make the case...
02/08/08 -
Dipnote - We evacuated dependents and children on Saturday before the start of the war. They left at 4:00 AM and the war started around 9:00 AM. The Department of Defense element came to the compound to secure it. We were all divided into 2 groups. One group with the Ambassador was at the embassy, and the other group was on the U.S. housing compound. We were all put in one room, and the 11 of us were right...
02/07/08 -
ALL THINGS PAKISTAN - Perhaps not so much for the actual damage they render to the suffering individual but for the other spin-off consequences that result as a direct cause of mental problems. The shame associated with mental illness, even if just depression, permeates every class of the society indiscriminately and the women are the worst casualties of it. Estimates put the figure of the total mentally ill at 14...
02/07/08 -
the white path - Any quick history of Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, will surely include the institutions he created, from İş Bank to Ankara University to the ideology that bears his name. But who knew the story of the little church that he created until it found itself entangled in the alleged ultra-nationalist criminal gang called “Ergenekon”? This group of about three dozen nationalist figures,...
02/07/08 -
Russia Blog - U.S. nuclear power reactors will be able to obtain more supplies of Russian enriched uranium for fuel, under a trade deal signed by the two countries late on Friday, February 1, 2008. The agreement will provide U.S. utilities with a reliable supply of nuclear fuel by allowing Russia to boost exports to the United States while minimizing any disruption to the U.S. domestic enrichment industry. "The...
02/06/08 -
Effect Measure - The mass poisoning that is occurring in West Bengal and Bangladesh is another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Drinking water is one of the most important resources for any community and the government with the aid and encouragement of international intergovernmental, non-profit and governmental aid organizations began to supply the poorest in the population with a source of groundwater...
02/06/08 -
Tim Worstall - Fertility is falling, literacy rates have risen tremendously, both contributing to the demographic transition so that the population bomb argument is near irrelevant now....but there is one critique that might carry some weight. That globalisation is increasing inequality. Now I, as a personal matter, don't worry too much about inequality, thinking that the alleviation of absolute poverty is our...
02/06/08 -
Publius Pundit - Economic attainment not only places Russia at a woefully inferior standard of living, but prevents it from matching the other G-8 nations in military expenditures as well. Russia's level of democracy is also, of course, abysmally lower than that of the other G-8 nations, as repeatedly confirmed by international ratings agencies, and it has a hostile relationship with NATO, of which all other members...
02/05/08 -
transatlantic politics - Coupled with a non-united Europe and the fading influence of the US State Department in Eastern Europe, Vladimir Putin strikes again today on the energy front by securing a deal on the South Stream gas pipeline with Bulgaria, one of his closest allies and also dubbed "Russia's trojan horse in the EU". During his final visit as Russia's President to a foreign country, Putin managed to get Bulgaria...
02/05/08 -
FP Watch - Previous sanctions, admittedly much weaker in design than they could be and even weaker in implementation, have not had the intended result of forcing a suspension of uranium enrichment at Natanz. The latest assembled package promises only a bit more bite, proposing to "authorize inspections of air and sea cargo going in and out of Iran" and deepening the travel ban and asset freeze of individuals...
02/05/08 -
Brad Sester - The part about the rising importance of government-controlled funds is hard to dispute, especially given their role in the recapitalization of the US financial system. But I would argue that the rise of sovereign wealth funds -- and more generally, the rise of what Martin Wolf called "state capitalism" -- is the almost inevitable result of the state's leading role in the current process of globalization,...
02/04/08 -
Michael Totten - The United States military plans to formally hand over Anbar Province to the Iraqis this spring because the insurgency truly is finished in that part of the country. Most Americans have heard about the success in this province by now, but few seem to be aware that the cities of Anbar were the scenes of the most ferocious fighting: Ramadi, Haditha, and – worst of all – Fallujah. The Americans...
02/04/08 -
Ahmadinejad - One's perspective regarding government and governance determines the way one ‎should cooperate with the people. If one recognizes government as a privilege and prey ‎of the governors, then the period of governance can be counted as an opportunity to fulfill ‎the expectations of certain individuals and groups or the ostentation and hedonism of the ‎governors.‎ But if in our view,...
02/04/08 -
SIG III - Kenya provides a great individual case study of the African blogosphere, as there has been a lot happening there in terms of developing Internet access and localized Kenyan content in 2007. Despite halting progress, The Kenyan government is working on securing more widespread Internet access through an undersea fiberoptic cable, and has received money from the World Bank to facilitate this connection...
02/03/08 -
Transatlantic Politics - Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, loves to outsource some of its industries to the much cheaper Eastern European countries. Its half socialist, half conservative and free trade supporting government allegedly understands the importance of freedom. Freedom of movement, freedom of investing, freedom of relocating. Beautiful principles, as long as they don’t affect German workers. Especially West...
02/03/08 -
the oil drum - Let us venture into a political no-go zone and say that at some point in the not too distant future there is a bitter pill that we will need to swallow and we are getting just a foretaste with the current energy crisis. In a nutshell, our global growth based economic model is fundamentally unsustainable. This is not a new idea, but one that dates back to the early 1970s. At that time there was...
02/03/08 -
FP Watch - IR professor Seth Weinberger, writing at his always-informative blog, argues that the UN's Darfur mission is -- quite unsurprisingly -- failing badly. With a highly obstructionist Sudanese government, unreliable African Union forces, and limited international commitment, peacekeeping forces (a joint AU-UN operation) have been unable to effectively end the violence. As Weinberger notes, the UN is in...
02/02/08 -
Bruce Falconer - Afghanistan. In the 1980s, we sent in the CIA, gave weapons to the mujahideen, and defeated the Soviets. In the 1990s, we got out, allowed our erstwhile allies to kill each other, and sat by as the country was taken over by religious fanatics and terrorists. After 9/11, we realized our mistake, went back in, chased Al Qaeda and the Taliban out of their caves, and declared victory. Afterward, we...
02/02/08 -
Daniel Duquenal - Yesterday we got yet another proof that the Venezuelan judicial system has become simply another repressive arm of the regime. In fact, as we have often discussed in this page the closest branch of the Venezuelan government to a dictatorial situation is the judicial system. The evidence we discussed on and off is as follows, in no particular order: - justices chanting "Uh! Ah! Chavez no se va!"...
02/02/08 -
michaelyon - 4 Rifles launched a “trigger op” later that night, a simple operation designed to interdict smugglers. The vast area is so heavily mined that going just a few feet off the road can be fatal. Much of the smuggling is apparently happening on the nearby Shat al Arab River, the seizure of which had been one of Saddam’s prime excuses for launching one of the largest and longest-running conventional...
01/31/08 -
Kim Zigfeld - It’s universally agreed in the West that the charges against Khodorkovsky were a sham, a neo-Soviet artifice designed to nullify his nascent efforts to challenge Vladimir Putin for the Russian presidency in 2004, just as the election cycle was beginning. As we’ve previously reported, Khodorkovsky’s team is challenging their convictions in the European Court for Human Rights and has enjoyed...
01/31/08 -
monkey mucker - For years western countries like the US and Britain have forced alien political systems on African nations. They've told them, "You must be a democracy like we are!" Of course it doesn't matter to the US or to Britain that for hundreds of thousands of years Africans got along fine without democracy. The US, Britain, and other countries have insisted that multi-national corporations be allowed to...
01/31/08 -
Tim Johnson - Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde figure – Dr. Jekyll abroad and Mr. Hyde for many countrymen back home. With his coifed hair, pencil-thin moustache, impeccable designer suits and easy command of English, Musharraf often comes across as an affable, moderate leader. His fortes are charm and aplomb. These qualities are rare among many Muslim leaders. He’s...
01/30/08 -
Uskowi on Iran - An agreement by US, Europe, Russia and China on a draft of a new UN sanction resolution against Iran angered the Iranian leadership and dominated the coverage in the local media. President Ahmadinejad vowed Iran would continue its uranium enrichment program and called any new sanctions “unwise and unjust.” On domestic front, the upcoming parliamentary elections in the country dominated the news....
01/30/08 -
Bruce Bawer - Not very long ago, Oslo was an icy Shangri-la of Scandinavian self-discipline, governability, and respect for the law. But in recent years, there have been grim changes, including a rise in gay-bashings. The summer of 2006 saw an unprecedented wave of them. The culprits, very disproportionately, are young Muslim men. It’s not just Oslo, of course. The problem afflicts most of Western Europe....
01/30/08 -
FP Watch - For many years, Yemen's had a shady relationship with Islamic militants. In the late 1980s, they welcomed thousands of Afghani-trained mujahideen into the country and, in 1994, President Ali Abdullah Saleh (left) used his connections to such militant factions in order to suppress a brief north-south civil war. Since then, ties have remained -- for both the government and the Islamists, there appears...
01/30/08 -
Social Europe Blog - Whatever happens in his remaining term in office, Greek Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis has secured a place in history. The first PM to pay an official state visit to Turkey in 49 years, Karamanlis's trip confirmed that the old archrivals have moved a long way from the bitter animosity of the recent past.Ever since the late 1990s, a host of reasons has led to a marked improvement of the two NATO...
01/30/08 -
Prospects for Peace - The annual right-wing Israeli shindig known as the Herzliya Conference has just drawn to a close. The conference is organized by Uzi Arad, former adviser to Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, and has in the last years become an Israeli-American neo-con love-fest. Of course like on any good Fox News show, there is a generous sprinkling of non-neo-con folk who lend legitimacy to the gathering. ...
01/30/08 -
Counterterrorism Blog - Do America’s secret soldiers play well together? There is fresh evidence that the post-9/11 military still is plagued by inter-service rivalries that may be impacting critical counterterrorism operations. The revelations have come out in the extraordinary case unfolding in a tiny makeshift courtroom at Camp Lejeune, N.C., where a Marine “court of inquiry” - the first convened in a half-century...
01/28/08 -
poligazette - Over the past few years, Turkey has emerged as one of the global stars of foreign direct investment (FDI). The Turkish lira has reached unprecedented levels of strength, allowing Turks to better cope with rising energy prices, experience unprecedented buying power in the form of cheap goods from China and for wealthier Turks, it has given them more confidence to purchase foreign delicacies such as...
01/28/08 -
Michael Totten - At the end of 2006 there were 3,000 Marines in Fallujah. Despite what you might expect during a surge of troops to Iraq, that number has been reduced by 90 percent. All Iraqi Army soldiers have likewise redeployed from the city. A skeleton crew of a mere 250 Marines is all that remains as the United States wraps up its final mission in what was once Iraq's most violent city. “The Iraqi Police...
01/28/08 -
Agonist - Maybe the European example will give some anti-immigration Americans pause. We've seen how European far-right groups have mobilized concepts like "freedom" and "patriotism" in the past, and the results were not pretty. Anyone can claim those terms, implicitly suggesting that their opponents are unpatriotic and anti-freedom. Invoking them - along with ideals of racial, linguistic, and national "purity"...
01/27/08 -
pakistaniat - Gen. Musharraf sits firm in control; for now. A major national leader has been assassinated; and whether the elections are held or what might happen in them remains shrouded in doubt and speculation. The assault on the nation by extremists and terrorists have intensified. And the economy is taking a spin for the ordinary Pakistan. Despair is thick in the air and neither the military government,...
01/27/08 -
The Moderate Voice - Europeans are watching the run up to Super Tuesday with a mixture of trepidation and bemusement after Barack Obama’s overwhelming win in South Carolina, where he captured 80% of the black vote. There is trepidation because the person and party that rule America have an extraordinary influence on the fate of Europeans, who are close military and economic allies of the US. Bemusement because the...
01/27/08 -
China Law Blog - Paying employees more does improve performance, and it does it in at least two ways. If you pay your good employees more, they are more likely to stay with your company and forsake all others. This allows you to retain good employees and overall company performance rises. The second way is more direct and, presumably, more what Chris had in mind. If you pay people well, they will be enthused about...
01/25/08 -
Martin Kramer - “This may be a blessing in disguise.” This is how an unnamed Israeli official greeted the destruction by Hamas of a chunk of the border barrier separating Gaza from Egypt, followed by an unregulated flood of hundreds of thousands of Gazan Palestinians across the border into Egypt. “Some people in the Defense Ministry, Foreign Ministry and prime minister’s office are very happy with this....
01/25/08 -
Christopher McGuiness - It's been less than two decades since Samuel Huntington proudly proclaimed that a "third wave" of democracy was sweeping through much of the old Second and Third Worlds, bringing about major economic and political reforms. Many observers saw this as unbelievable progress for developing countries, lavishing praise upon the economists and government officials who implemented the policies. The echoes...
01/25/08 -
Brad Plumber - It seems like every week a news story will surface about how horrifying labor abuses in China are proceeding apace. After awhile, it all starts to blend together, since nothing ever changes. But this recent booklet from the Albert Shanker Institute, documenting the growing outburst of wildcat strikes and demonstrations around the country, is worth highlighting. The vignettes are compiled from...
01/24/08 -
State Gov Blog - There is a lot of activity these days in El Fasher, North Darfur's remote, dusty capital. In fact, the once-sleepy city of about 200,000 is booming: new hotels and houses are being built all around town, the downtown market is growing and they're putting street lights along the main road. UNAMID's presence in town remains limited, but it's clear everybody expects a surge of people over the coming...
01/24/08 -
get fresh cut - Since 2005, Internet access in the People’s Republic of China has become increasingly filtered and censored, a trend that will soon extend beyond traditional news sites and blogs and into the realm of Internet video. Beginning on January 31, a new set of regulations will go into effect, banning all web video content from broadcasting “politically or morally objectionable content” and requiring...
01/24/08 -
Counterterrorism Blog - Kashmir militancy is spreading its tentacles beyond the troubled Northern Indian State. Its supreme leader, Syed Salahuddin, once said that HM is only operating in Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) and fights for the liberation of Kashmir. But the recent arrest of a suspected HM cadre from Kumali (Idukki district) in the Southern Indian State of Kerala indicates the extent of HM’s reach beyond J&K and its...
01/23/08 -
ethan zuckerman - At the same time, Internet penetration in Brazil is quite low by the standards of developed nations, with 22.4% of the population connected. And while Brazil has full democracy and a free and vibrant media, it has no freedom of information law, which is critically important for journalists trying to investigate government stories. And while Brazil’s egovernment initiatives are being recognized...
01/23/08 -
sean's russia blog - Dmitri Medvedev officially becomes a candidate for President of Russia and the stock market tanks. Probably not the soundtrack he would have chosen for his coming out party. The Russian press is screaming in terror. I’m sure someone will eventually blame it on the Americans. The Russian stock market lost 7 percent of its value on Monday in what the The Moscow Times says is being called “The...
01/23/08 -
Long War Journal - Afghanistan’s burgeoning air force received a morale boost this week as several donated Czech helicopters, including gunships, were inaugurated in a ceremony at the newly constructed $22 million military hangar called Aviation Facility 1. President Hamid Karzai, several military leaders, and other Afghan officials attended the event. "This is the rebirth of the Afghan air force," Karzai told...
01/22/08 -
rightwing nuthouse - In short, they conclude that NATO is not addressing the fundamental security threats facing the organization in a rapidly changing world and that there is a real danger that NATO itself will not survive many of the challenges facing it. The headline grabbing part of the article is actually the least surprising – that NATO should maintain its nuclear first strike option. This has always been...
01/22/08 -
Balkinization - The hukou system of citizen registration, used to control China's vast populations, requires that Chinese register in their place of origin; when they move from rural areas to the cities, they must register at regular intervals as temporary workers. Because registration requirements are expensive and cumbersome, many rural Chinese in the big cities do not have proper documentation, leading to multiple...
01/22/08 -
Social Europe Blog - Many institutional provisions of the Reform Treaty are framed, perhaps deliberately, in general, permissive or tentative terms. The real impact of these provisions will therefore only emerge in the course of their implementation. This implementation will be influenced by the personalities involved in the workings of the new structures and the general political background against which implementation...
01/21/08 -
whirledview - The official US position was that we did not need agreements to operate in friendly countries and besides such agreements committed the US to agree to funding levels it might not be able to meet. In my view, both arguments were specious. Sometimes – depending upon the type of cultural/educational program one wants to run – even the US needs official agreements. I know for sure that we would have...
01/21/08 -
indian economy blog - It’s time to revisit that case, given that Kundapur, a coastal town in Karnataka has decided to privatize it’s water supply. To summarize, so far, this town was dependent on ground water. Now, they are getting water from the river Varahi. Residents have to pay Rs. 4000 for the connection (half of that refundable), and the monthly bill will come within Rs. 100, they’ve said. There are two...
01/21/08 -
ALL THINGS PAKISTAN - Pakistan is a land of creative cell-phone ringtones. Sometimes, I feel, a little too creative. You are sitting in a meeting with some very self-important and staid people - officials, businessmen, buzurg grandfather types - and one of their cell-phone rings: and the ring-tone is a computer synthesis of “Sanou Nehr Waaley Pul Tey Bulla Kay” or “Nawa Aaya Aye Soonia.” Even though the...
01/20/08 -
Tehran Post - The first ten days of Muharram are the days Shiites commemorate martyrdom of Hussein, Muhammad’s (pbuh) grandson and Shiites’ third Imam. Hussein rose up against Yazeed, second Umayyad caliph. Mu’aviah –Yazeed’s father- was himself the governor of Damascus at the time of Ali (fourth caliph/Shiites’ first Imam/father of Hussein), who disobeyed Ali, engaged in a war with him and his other...
01/20/08 -
Western Resistance - Think that the recently released National Intelligence Estimate claiming Iran stopped its nuclear development program has changed the case against attacking Iran's nuclear facilities? Well, fraudulent, politically-corrupt documents should change nothing but the employment status of their authors.... Norman Podhoretz makes the case for military action: Stopping Iran: Why the Case for Military...
01/20/08 -
Oil Drum - "Engineer Live" has an interesting article on avoiding a Lake Nyos style tragedy in the regions bordering Lake Kivu, between Rwanda and the Congo, and generating a large amount of power while doing so - by extracting methane from the lake water and using it for power generation. The waters of Lake Kivu have absorbed enormous amounts of gas over the years, estimated to be around 250 billion m3 of...
01/18/08 -
vigilante journalist - The last day of outlawed protests in Kenya saw a great deal of bloodshed in the Nairobi slum of Kibera. MSF has reported 15 gunshot wounds, and three deaths at the time of writing. Police and military used excessive force on demonstraters after they destroyed a portion of the train track route that leads to Uganda, effectively cutting off supply routes. They used tear gas and live ammunition on...
01/18/08 -
FP Watch - The use of cluster munitions received renewed attention after the Israeli-Hezbollah war in southern Lebanon in the summer of 2006 and the bombing campaigns in Afghanistan a few years back. Conventional wisdom holds that weapons are universally banned when states no longer see a political or military utility for them (biological and chemical weapons a case in point), or when international pressure...
01/18/08 -
Long War Journal - The Taliban in South Waziristan have overrun a fort manned by the Frontier Corps in the town of Sararogha. During a massed assault, the Taliban launched a coordinated attack on the military post manned by 42 paramilitary soldiers of the Frontier Corps. The military claimed seven soldiers and up to 50 Taliban were killed. Reports indicate 20 paramilitaries may have been captured by the Taliban. The...
01/18/08 -
michae ltotten - Iraqi Army soldiers have a terrible reputation for cowardice and corruption – especially in Baghdad – but it’s unfair to write them all off after reading the news out of Iraq’s capital Sunday. Three Iraqi Army soldiers tackled a suicide bomber at an Army Day parade and were killed when he exploded his vest. While embedded with the United States Army and Marines I heard over and over again...
01/18/08 -
foreign policy - False promises…a new life, money, a job, security, food, and shelter, are all tools used to lure millions of woman and children into slavery. Millions more are violently kidnapped, or sold by various family and friends. Hidden among the dark streets, millions of children live as the prey to greed. Used as a commodity’s, their childhoods are stolen away before they even begin. This week the...
01/18/08 -
Brad Sester - A conservative estimate of the increase in the bank’s holding would be about $60b -- $40b from the increase in what I believe to be the banks foreign currency liabilities to the central bank and CIC through November (as reported by the PBoC) and $20b from the late December recapitalization of China Development Bank. A conservative estimate would put the CIC’s end-December holdings of foreign...
01/16/08 -
prospects for peace - his was Bush's first visit as president after 7 years in office. So, while it was a little late for a meet and greet, the president did come across as being absolutely serious in his intention to deliver an Israeli-Palestinian two-state agreement by the end of his term in office. Precious little progress since Annapolis had been made between the parties either on their day-to-day commitments or in...
01/16/08 -
RBC - Its first president, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was a prominent Soviet dissident and a rabid nationalist; he was recently buried for the fourth (and, one hopes, final) time—this time in Tbilisi, after his grave was “discovered” in Chechnya. Zviad’s successor was Eduard Shevardnadze, the hero of German reunification and pal of James Baker. Shevy’s welcome wore thin and he was ousted by Mikheil...
01/16/08 -
Uskowi on Iran - During his visit to Gulf Arab states, President Bush urged their leaders to join him in confronting Iran, “before it’s too late.” He described Iran as “the world's leading state sponsor of terror.” A leading state sponsor of terror with a strong military and proven nuclear capability is a threat to all countries in the region, Bush told the Arab leaders. Iran must be stopped now. That...
01/15/08 -
Eurozone Watch - Most likely, the German grand coalition will hold until the general elections in 2009. For none of the large parties, there is an alternative and there is little they would gain from early elections. Coming to the beggar-thy-neighbour-policy of Germany, there will most likely be no new initiatives in 2008. In the past years, this policy has not been intentional but rather a result of the idea that...
01/15/08 -
EU Referendum - The thesis is illustrated by detailed accounts of the precise effect of the EU's predatory "third country" fishing deals which are stripping African countries of one of their primary resources, forcing whole communities into poverty, thus triggering the wave of immigration into EU territory. Yet we wrote about this first in this blog on 12 November 2004, when we noted that a report from the United...
01/15/08 -
Angry Bear - Now that violence in Iraq is down to levels that were unacceptable a few years ago, there's been much chest-pounding from certain quarters. But let's assume that magically, by the end of this day, all violence in Iraq ceases, and within weeks all those who fled their homes - either leaving the country or at least their neighborhood - return. Let's further assume that all is quiet from here on out,...
01/14/08 -
Social Europe Blog - A striking feature of the discussion about the European Reform Treaty agreed by the European Council in Lisbon has been the ability of commentators, confronted with exactly the same text, to disagree radically over the document's significance. For some, it is a mildly disappointing document, lacking in focus and ambition; for others it is a springboard for exciting and far-reaching future developments;...
01/14/08 -
Inside Iraq - This problem is really founded in the beginning of eighties of the last century during the Iraqi –Iran war ( 1980-1988) and it became bigger after the invasion of Kuwait having the second gulf war in ( 1990-1991).But things became worst in the third war in 2003.In the past we have the shortage for hours or days then the problem would be solved to have the full power again . In the nineties we...
01/14/08 -
Politics & Theory - The proposed policy under discussion in the U.K. would change their system from an 'opt-in' to an 'opt-out' scheme. Instead of presuming, that is, that a brain dead individual would not want to donate their organs, the new proposal would presume that they do want to donate. Anyone who has an objection (e.g., on religious grounds) has the option to indicate in advance that in the event of their death...
01/13/08 -
Andrew Sullivan - But the passage of the law allowing for more Sunnis and former Baathists to take part in the national government's structure is new. It's a genuine success of the kind we were once promised. It's the first actual data point that suggests some kind of reconciliation may be possible in Baghdad. Nonetheless, I don't think it's churlish to be cautious. There are many, many caveats in the press, let...
01/13/08 -
Counterterrorism Blog - The Hezbollah media arm rushed to deny the veracity of this shift. But observers with direct knowledge of the organization's inside structure said Khamenei indeed ordered changes in Hezbollah's structures, but not because of differences between its leaders. They said it was in preparation for a potential massive move by Hezbollah to seize more power in Lebanon and before a possible clash with the...
01/13/08 -
Brad Sester - I don't think it is an accident that the RMB's depreciation against the euro has led to a huge increase in China's trade surplus with Europe. Richard McGregor reports that Chinese exports to Europe were up 29% y/y in 2007, while Chinese exports to the US were up only 14% (using the Chinese data, which tends to understate total exports to both the US and Europe because of shipments through Hong Kong,...
01/11/08 -
Crooked Timber - 150,000 violent deaths in three years is a lot. You’ll recall that the Lancet study estimated about 655,000 excess deaths, which is a lot more. The two numbers aren’t directly comparable because excess deaths due to violence are only one component of all excess deaths (e.g., from preventable disease or other causes attributable to the war). Deaths due to violence rose from a very small 0.1 per...
01/11/08 -
FP Watch - Isolating Iran in the region is nothing new in policy toward the Middle East. Indeed, ever since the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979, the subsequent hostage taking of US diplomats, and the vehemence of the Khomeini revolution, the goal has been to isolate Iran, and doing so has required keeping the Saud family strong, protecting the Gulf emirates, maintaining close bilateral and multilateral...
01/11/08 -
Russia Blog - Muscovites who live in the city’s Strogino neighborhood received a nice gift from the City of Moscow for Orthodox Christmas – a new subway station. The Strogino station is the 176th station of the Moscow’s Metro. The station has modern design, unlike many Soviet-era stations. However, the benches and floors of the stations are decorated with expensive woods and granite. Combination of...
01/10/08 -
Abu Aardvark - The runup to Bush's trip to the Middle East reminded me very much of Cheney's famous 2002 trip, when all he wanted to talk about was Iraq, and all the Arabs wanted to talk about was the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Bush clearly views the purpose of the trip as mobilizing support for confronting Iran, something in which the Gulf states these days don't seem to have a lot of interest. Most of the...
01/10/08 -
Captain's Quarters - Britain has endorsed nuclear power as a solution to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions. They will encourage new facility construction with an eye to having the next generation of stations on line by 2020. The environmental lobby, which has pushed the global warming issue, did not respond positively to this development. The problem with the Greenpeace approach is that it won't generate the energy...
01/10/08 -
Tim Johnson - Anyone who doubts that China can overcome its severe _ even dire _ environmental problems should take a look at its new policy to ban the use of some plastic shopping bags. In a simple fiat hours ago, the State Council banned production of the ultra-thin bags and told stores that as of June 1 they can no longer hand them out to shoppers for free. “Our country consumes huge amounts of plastic...
01/09/08 -
All Things Pakistan - I got ‘shifa‘ (health) in the same private hospital so I do not want to sound like a thankless soul. They have been fairly nice, cooperative, caring and professionals to help me out of my suffering but at the same time I noticed incidents of negligence that have left me disturbed. For example, I saw an old lady-patient slipping and falling to the ground through the hands of physiotherapists....
01/09/08 -
Michael Totten - Since Abu Musab Al Zarqawi formed the Al Qaeda in Iraq franchise, the terrorist group that destroyed the World Trade Center has fought American soldiers and what they call the near enemy, fellow Muslims, instead of civilians in the homeland of the far enemy, the United States. This may be good for Americans, but it has been a catastrophe for Iraqis – especially in Baghdad, Ramadi, and Fallujah. I...
01/08/08 -
Strategic Security Blog - China's entire fleet of approximately 55 general-purpose submarines conducted a total of six patrols during 2007, slightly better than the two patrols conducted in 2006 and zero in 2005. The 2007 performance matches China's all-time high of six patrols conducted in 2000, the only two years since 1981 that Chinese submarines conducted more than five patrols in a single year. The new information,...
01/08/08 -
michael yon - William Rigby and his identical twin brother John were in 4 Rifles. On their 23rd birthday, John was up in the hatch of a Bulldog when a bomb detonated and a piece of shrapnel struck his head, mortally wounding him. William was by John’s side when he passed, and accompanied his brother home. The Regiment gave William the choice to stay home or return to Basra. When he elected to return to see the...
01/08/08 -
American Scene - Try to envision North Korea as an individual. Imagine they are a person and the state system is actually a village. I hate even thinking in these terms — it really is horrible methodologically and in the opportunities for intellectual abuse it raises — but here it’s pedagogically instructive. Because if there’s a reified state out there (a state like a single individual), it’s North Korea....
01/07/08 -
Counterterrorism Blog - This is a good political move given the massive suspicion on the country's streets that Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf was behind her death -- suspicions that Musharraf has fueled through his government's incompetent handling of the aftermath of Bhutto's killing. It seems that Western behind-the-scenes pressure played a role in the invitation that Musharraf extended to Scotland Yard. An...
01/07/08 -
poligazette - While the lure of these conditions continues to prevail for the most part, Mehmet’s forecast for the future of his business would appear to have great relevance to the prospects of the Turkish economy in general. “In three years I will have to close my production line,” Mehmet predicted. In order to compete with Chinese manufacturers vying for Vestel’s supply contracts, Mehmet’s business...
01/07/08 -
Social Europe Blog - The territorial and economic imperatives of empire will continue to make it difficult for Russia to evolve a political system which conforms to western norms. The middle class will expand, but there is no assurance it will become ‘liberal’ in the western sense. So the Russian political system will probably remain autocratic for the foreseeable future, with a facade of democracy. This is...
01/06/08 -
FP Watch - Vladimir Putin, a bland bureaucrat who unexpectedly rose to power and prominence as Yeltsin’s steady-handed prime minister in 1999, took a much more authoritarian turn. He promptly took control over three independent TV networks – RTR, ORT, and NTV – and has since solidified media control to the extent today where the Kremlin owns, or has major influence over, all of the primary outlets....
01/06/08 -
neoneocon - War is bad enough without exaggerating the resultant death toll. But this embellishment has an old lineage, although science has not usually been involved. Joseph Goebbels knew only too well the value of playing on the number of German casualties from Allied bombings, in an attempt to even the score between the Nazis and the Allies in the minds of the tender-hearted, when he greatly inflated the...
01/06/08 -
pavellas Perspective - The accepted figure for a country's fertility rate that will, without regard to net immigration, keep a country at a constant population is 2.1 births per woman of child-bearing age. The World average is 2.6 births per woman. On the assumption that it is 'good' for a country to have a fertility rate between 2.1 and 2.6 (irrespective of net immigration figures), these countries are the outliers....
01/04/08 -
Uskowi on Iran - Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, in a major speech delivered yesterday in Yazd, spoke against normalizing relations with the US, at least for now. Establishing relations with the US, he warned, would prepare the ground for the growth of US influence in Iran and creates a danger for the country because of “the travel of their intelligence officers and spies to and from Iran.” Khamenie...
01/04/08 -
joshua landis - Syria's foreign minister who was in Istanbul that day was not invited. Apparently his presence was not as necessary to "maximize effectiveness" as that of the UAE's foreign minister. Yet it was Syria, and not Saudi Arabia or Egypt (or the UAE) that disappointed the French and Americans in its failure to enable them to announce that they (The French and the Americans) succeeded in making the Lebanese...
01/04/08 -
The Oil Drum - This article is an attempt to apply the Hybrid Shock Model (HSM) on Saudi Arabia's oil production. In a nutshell, the HSM is trying to model the observed production profile from the discovery curve by simulating the different phases involved in the development of oilfields (initial discovery, planning, build, maturity). The HSM is a variant of the Shock Model initially proposed by WebHubbleTelescope....
01/03/08 -
fistful of euros - Well briskly moving on to the topic in hand, things are really begining to move quite quickly in Hungary now, as one external observer after another begins to realise that policy in Hungary may now be well and truly stuck in a cul-de-sac (or even double bind). Indeed, unfortunately, as we will see below, I fear that they may soon start to move even more quickly. The first bit of relevant news in...
01/03/08 -
Pajamas Media - Farhan, who is affectionately called the dean of Saudi blogging, is one of the very few Saudi bloggers who is not afraid of the government and writes under his own name. His explained the reason for his fearlessness in an interview: “The government’s battle is against the terrorists who want to destroy our nation, and if you were a terrorist then you won’t be thinking about starting a blog,...
01/03/08 -
the white path - To be blunt, today France is on a slippery slope toward becoming the next sick man of Europe. Its economy is in bad shape, in particular compared with its historic rival, the United Kingdom. French society is growingly nationalist, protective and even xenophobic – evidenced by its obsessive reaction to Turkey's European Union membership process. (Again, compare that to the Britain's self-confident...
01/02/08 -
Counterterrorism Blog - Former Pakistani Prime Minster Benazir Bhutto was murdered because of herpotential actions in Pakistan, by the combined forces of jihadism in that country. In short, they executed her to pre-empt her future war of ideas. This was the bottom line and here is why. The long-term plan of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan during the 1990s was to eventually spread to Pakistan and seize power,...
01/02/08 -
EUReferendum - To celebrate Slovenia's elevation, its government – as is the custom – has commissioned a presidency logo (above) which, it proudly tells us, "resembles an oak leaf, which reflects the solid, persistent, dependable character of Slovenes, a people who are cool under pressure and thoughtful in their decisions." The oak wood, we are informed, "represents high quality, as for example when used in...
01/02/08 -
Captain's Quarters - The Kibaki government has an interest in having this cast as a tribal war. If he can sell this as an attempted genocide by the Luo, then he can sidestep Western criticism over the rigged election and put the blame on the Luo for the unrest. After Rwanda and Darfur, Europeans and Americans have a great deal of sensitivity towards accusations of ethnic cleansing, and the Telegraph report helps build...
01/01/08 -
Daniel Venezuela - Chavez declarations are even becoming indecent, inappropriate, vulgar. I heard him for example declare that in spite of all the falling out with Uribe (“platos rotos” broken dishes) if this one would allow him he would jump in a plane and fly over to Colombia to retrieve the hostages himself. But do not be fooled in thinking that maybe it is just Chavez high on something. No, it is a well...
01/01/08 -
FP Watch - It's plausible that North Korea could be holding out on providing the declaration till all of its technical ducks are in a row and the facilities at the Yongbyon nuclear complex have been fully disabled - a last-ditch bargaining chip, so to speak. But even at that, the sticking points the US will be searching for in the declaration are what North Korea adheres to in terms of the enrichment question,...
01/01/08 -
Winds of Change - The word terrorism has been used to describe the activities of various groups over the last half century. For example, the British denounced the operations carried out by the Irish Republican Army as terrorism, while the same description was applied to the activities of such militant groups as ETA, the organization seeking autonomy for the Basque region lying between Spain and France, the Red Brigades...
12/31/07 -
Social Europe Blog - The economic partnership between the European Union and the United States is the deepest and largest bilateral trade and investment relationship in the world. Trade flows across the Atlantic are running at around €1.7 billion a day. The EU is home to almost 70% of total outward US investment. In 2005, American companies invested four times as much in Belgium as they did in China the following...
12/31/07 -
Captain's Quarters - The time is right? The prospects are good? Syria has conducted a series of assassinations in Lebanon over the past two years, killing politicians who oppose its rule over what it sees as a vassal state. The UN has demanded cooperation from Assad and his government, which has not been forthcoming, over the first assassination of Rafik Hariri. On top of that, Syria has re-armed Hezbollah in the...
12/31/07 -
neoneocon - It’s a trick question, like the one about the chicken and egg. The truth is they must come simultaneously. And ay, there’s (as Hamlet would say) the rub, because in chaotic third-world nations—Pakistan comes immediately to mind, of course—the two exist in very uneasy and difficult-to-implement equilibrium. Democracy requires a certain amount of openness and civility. Despite accusations...
12/30/07 -
Mehrzad Boroujerdi - While pundits are busy debating who was responsible for Benazir’s tragic death, the larger tragedy of Pakistan’s political history should not be overlooked. A country whose name literary means “the Land of the Pure” and which was intended to become a free and flourishing promised land for Muslims in the subcontinent has become sullied with chronic poverty, political violence, ethnic strife,...
12/30/07 -
Iranian Girl - Its not been a long time since Iranian women started working outside their homes and have serious jobs. yet in this moment only 20% of us have jobs, others are house-wives or just live with their parents without being able to handle themselves financially. fortunately this number of working women is growing as we have lots of female university students (more than 50% of all students) i hope that in...
12/30/07 -
sean's russia blog - Claims of Putin’s hidden money bags comes from an interview Stanislav Belkovsky recently gave to Die Welt. There Belkovsky perhaps spells out the true nature of “Putinism,” a nature that harks back to Andrei Pointkovsky’s claim that Putinism is “the highest stage of robber capitalism.” Indeed, except Russian capitalism is more like collective thievery. Under Putin’s tenure, says...
12/28/07 -
CARMA - The Bali Conference witnessed more controversy about who should take responsibility for carbon emissions reduction. India and China refused to accept explicit emissions limits, citing the potential costs, their poverty problems. and US intransigence. The US countered by refusing to accept emissions limits as long as India, China and other developing countries remain exempt. Despite this rhetorical...
12/28/07 -
prospects for peace - At this week’s Cabinet meeting in Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert politely asked his colleagues to shut their mouths about the recently released U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Iran. Olmert’s gag order followed two weeks of unhelpful, knee-jerk reaction by some Israeli politicians caught off guard by the reports’ conclusions, which found that Iran suspended its covert...
12/28/07 -
Article Street - Mbeya is among of the four big cities in Tanzania, the dominant tribe of this city is Nyakyusa, though there are other tribes such sa Bena, Hehe, Kinga and so on , who are coming from the near region Iringa. The city of Mbeya is Located at the southern highlands, hence the climate of this area is very cool, especially during the month of April to July, also the area received heavy rainfall in many...
12/27/07 -
NextBillion - Not surprisingly, the evolution of mobile phone banking has not been without false steps, fraudulent operators, and systems that have flaws. But evolution also tends to produce winners that survive because they solve those problems. And the experience with G-Cash and Smart Money in the Philippines, with M-Pesa in Kenya, and, yes, with Wizzit in South Africa is that customers on the whole find a...
12/27/07 -
Strategy Page - Sometime within the next six months or so, al Qaeda or Saddamist terrorists will attempt a Tet offensive. No, Middle Eastern mass murderers don't celebrate the Vietnamese festival of Tet, but trust that America's enemies everywhere do celebrate and systematically seek to emulate the strategic political effects North Vietnam's 1968 attack obtained. This spring marks the 40th anniversary of...
12/27/07 -
Global Voices - Was it New Jersey's undoing of the 1976 reinstatement of capital punishment earlier this month, or the United Nations General Assembly's call for a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty a few days later that launched prominent Chinese bloggers into their own debate on the subject? NetEase has gotten nearly 3,000 comments to its piece on the latter move against state executions, and at blog...
12/26/07 -
Barnett - I love these two pieces: Islamic banking is now so big and so attractive globally, that you get non-Muslims buying in because it’s like this new form of socially-responsible investing, like buying a kosher hot dog because you trust the credentialing process! An estimated 300 Islamic banks hold half a trillion in assets. About 7-8 years ago, when Malaysia started pushing this crazy notion, there...
12/26/07 -
VOX EU - France is in the throes of a vicious circle – one that has considerable economic and social costs. For over 20 years, surveys carried out in developed countries reveal that the French, more so than elsewhere, don’t trust their fellow citizens. They’re the most likely to mistrust public powers, social partners, and the justice system. They are also the most resistant to the market economy. According...
12/26/07 -
Michael J. Totten - I haven’t written much about Lebanon lately, partly because I’ve been working in Iraq, but also because Lebanon has been in a holding pattern for the past year. There isn’t much new to say about the same-old same-old. But Andrew Exum published a perceptive piece about Hezbollah and makes a point made very rarely, if ever, in the West: There are several reasons making the fantasy that...
12/26/07 -
Tim Worstall - The value of any job in a market economy is set by supply and demand. We have a (relatively) fixed demand for MPs. Some 630 or so (roughly, isn’t it?). At the last general election some 3,000 people stood for one of those seats. Some will say that some were markedly unqualified (from Monster Raving Loonies to Trots of various types) but this isn’t, in a democracy, a valid position to hold....
12/26/07 -
beatroot - One of the most heart warming stories this year has been of Polish boxing and kickboxing champ Przemyslaw Saleta donating one of his kidneys to his sick baby daughter. It was a no brainer, I suppose. Your daughter needs a new kidney, and you have two of them. So Saleta went into surgery last week knowing he was doing the right thing. After the operation the daughter was doing well,...
12/26/07 -
The Moderate Voice - At a time when Britain celebrates the reign of its longest serving monarch Queen Elizabeth II, Nepal has decided to bid adieu to its centuries old royal institution. “Nepal’s government has agreed to abolish the monarchy as part of a deal to persuade Maoist former rebels to rejoin the interim administration,” reports the BBC. “Under the deal, Nepal will be declared a republic after a...
12/25/07 -
Roger Kimball - Well, I think it is stylish. Baris Kaska, a Turkish lawyer, doesn’t like it. Indeed, according to the London Times, Mr. Kaska has initiated legal action against the team, alleging that the “Crusader-style” uniforms are “offensive to Muslim sensibilities.” Yes, really. Baris Kaska, a lawyer in Izmir who specialises in European law, said that he had lodged a complaint in a local...
12/25/07 -
Mexico Premiere - I was scanning the wires today and was struck by two separate stories that oddly intersect, providing a glimpse into the immigration issue, not for the U.S., but for many Mexicans who will decide where they will attempt to work and live in the near future. The first story is an International Herald Tribune piece announcing the minimum wage increase in Mexico, to take effect in 2008. Yes,...
12/25/07 -
Daniel Venezuela - This is not an idle question. If the CNE announced that Chavez lost, then by all means he lost!!!! But was that the margin of victory? This question is rather easy to answer. First, nobody has come out yet with any evidence that the numbers are really that far off from what the CNE said. I mean, by the time all is in it is possible that the difference widens to somewhat more than 2%. But that...
12/24/07 -
Michael van der Galiën - The Netherlands is famous for such things as wooden shoes, windmills, and cheese. Of course my humble little country is also famous for less innocent things such as its soft policy on soft drugs (weed). Although growing and selling weed isn’t officially legal, it is condoned. This means that wherever you go, you can see someone smoking a “sticky,” as we call it. Aside from drugs, the...
12/24/07 -
counter terrorism blog - Word is out that today’s last ditch efforts to come up with new Security Council sanctions measures on Iran have failed. The Political Directors of the Security Council’s Permanent Five Members ( US, UK, France, Russia, China) and Germany reportedly threw in the towel following a fruitless international conference call between them earlier today. The matter will now be referred up the line to...
12/24/07 -
EU Referendum - Thanks to Tim Worstall, who, as I have mentioned before, actually reads the Guardian assiduously, we find this delightful little vignette. It seems that: The Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, is to buy a new Gulfstream presidential jet for £24m after convincing MPs that his £16m aircraft bought seven years ago is out of date. Well, I suppose it must be. As our readers recall I know...
12/21/07 -
Balkinization - After more than ten years of political wrangling and seven readings in the National People’s Congress, a new property law took effect this October. The law was considered revolutionary by many in China. Scholars and legislators have protested it throughout its development, arguing that the new law overturns the basic tenants of socialism to which China, despite its booming cities and rampant...
12/21/07 -
Social Europe - A new Eurobarometer poll published on Tuesday revealed an interesting connection: trust in the EU institutions is declining while support for EU membership has been rising to its highest level in ten years. Whereas the Centre for European Policy Studies seemed to struggle to interpret the results, there are some clear-cut explanations for this. Firstly, the support for EU membership...
12/21/07 -
Pavellas - This small investigation began with my post of November 21 this year wherein I presented a very few statistics gleaned from The World Factbook of the CIA, online. In the aforementioned blog I was struck by the disparity between the life expectancy at birth for males and females in Russia (59 vs 73) and Ukraine (62 and 74). I pondered this for a while then I decided to look at several more...
12/21/07 -
Captains Journal - In Musa Qala: The Argument for Force Projection, and Clarifying Expectations in Afghanistan, we discussed ongoing counterinsurgency operations in Afghanistan in light of the battle for Musa Qala, Afghanistan’s “battle of Fallujah” that never occurred. We discussed the heavy bombing approach, the evacuation of families from the city, the lack of adequate force projection to take and hold...
12/21/07 -
Good Will Hilton - I'm not sure if you are aware of the case of Eric Volz. Eric Volz is an American citizen and political prisoner in Nicaragua. Last year, Eric's ex-girlfriend was brutally murdered while Eric was in Managua, two hours away from the scene of the crime. Ten witnesses testified on behalf of Eric and his innocence. Unfortunately, the Nicaraguan media decided to make this a political issue by...
12/21/07 -
Uskowi on Iran - After years of debates and UN sanctions over Iran’s uranium enrichment program, Russia began delivering to Iran uranium U-235 isotope enriched by 3.62%. The enriched uranium will be used at Bushehr’s nuclear reactor, the first such power plant in Iran. The arrival of enriched uranium brought expression of relief and approval in Tehran. Reza Aghazadeh, head of Iranian Atomic Energy Organization...
12/20/07 -
Reflective Pundit - At the end of a lengthy interview with Ayman al-Zawahiri that was posted on extremist web sites last weekend, al-Qaeda’s own media production company As-Sahab announced that the terrorist organization’s second in command was inviting questions via an Islamist media center to be admitted within the next month. According to the announcement, these questions will be sent to al-Zawahiri and...
12/19/07 -
Tree Hugger - Malaria epidemics in the highlands of Papua New Guinea are "now basically happening every year" as a result of global warming, Ivo Mueller, a scientist at the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research, recently told the Associated Press. The World Health Organization recorded 4,986 malaria cases in the country's Western Highlands province in 2005, compared with 638 cases in 2000. About...
12/19/07 -
Enterprise Resilience Management Blog - Debates about the American education system abound. President Bush touts his "No Child Left Behind" program. Others push for school vouchers so that parents can take their children out of the public education arena and put them in private schools. Still others home school. The reality, however, is that there will always be tension in a system that tries to educate everyone and, at the same time,...
12/18/07 -
Bill Roggio - Multinational Forces-Iraq has released the data of the effects of the "surge" on the security situation. The reduction in deaths, attack trends, sectarian violence, and improvised explosive device, suicide, and car bomb attacks is dramatic. The number of weapons caches found per year has more than doubled. The graphs below have been provided by Multinational Forces Iraq. Click each graph to view...
12/18/07 -
Dani Rodrik - f the term ICA does not mean anything to you, you have not been paying much attention to development policy in recent years. The acronym refers to Investment Climate Assessment, and it has been the latest rage at the World Bank. It is essentially a survey of enterprises that asks a host of detailed questions about both the characteristics of their operation and the main constraints they face. The...
12/18/07 -
Vital Perspective - Allegations that the Bush Administration was driven to invade Iraq by a lust for the country’s oil have been part of the anti-war movement’s narrative even before the war’s first shots were fired. The image of a White House hijacked by a cabal of former oil executives who steer foreign policy to advance Big Oil's interests gained credence as disillusionment from the war grew. This idea is now...
12/18/07 -
becker Posner - When nations are ranked by gross national income per capita, the United States comes in sixth, after Luxembourg, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, and Iceland, confirming one's general impression that the United States is the wealthiest large country; none of the countries ranked ahead of the U.S. have more than a fortieth of the U.S. population (Switzerland, the most populous of the group, has...
12/18/07 -
All Things Pakistan - Bangladesh celebrates its Independence Day36 years ago, on December 16, 1971, then East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Last year Adil Najam had a very touching post on the same topic and I’ll strongly recommend a revisit to it here. Raza Rumi had also written a post after revisiting Dhaka recently. I belong to a generation which did not see those times. My knowledge about this significant...
12/18/07 -
Daniel Venezuela - In Venezuela we have a term of endearment for lovers, a tad old fashioned these days when language has acquired a je ne sais quelle crudeness, "cuchi-cuchi" (almost the same sound in Venezuela) . I thought of it as I was catching up some in my reading on the latest scandals which all involve revolutionaries who want to live well, while some other revolutionaries stand in line for hours to...
12/17/07 -
Democracy Arsenal - It was pointed out yesterday that the U.S. has begun building walls to separate segregated neighborhoods – a tactic actively deployed in Northern Ireland. While Matt describes these efforts in Northern Ireland as being some what “successful,” that is only true if the goal behind them was to achieve less violence, as opposed to broader political reconciliation. Erecting walls in both Belfast...
12/17/07 -
Bill Roggio - One day after the Taliban consolidated its command into the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan under the command of Baitullah Mehsud, al Qaeda commander Rashid Rauf has escaped Pakistani police custody. Rauf, who was one of two of the suspected ringleaders of the al Qaeda London Airline Plot to destroy aircraft en route to the United States, escaped after appearing before a judge in the capital of...
12/17/07 -
Captains Quarters - Just a year after the election of the leftist government in Bolivia, the nation's most resource-rich regions have moved towards secession from the central government. The move sets up a conflict on several levels between Evo Morales and the wealthy producers he has attempted to nationalize, and that conflict appears headed for violence: Tensions were rising in Bolivia on Saturday as...
12/15/07 -
Hit & Run - Nusa Dua, Bali-Climate change negotiations are not down to the wire, they're past it, but that's usual for U.N. conferences. In a nighttime press conference, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was asked how to describe the state of negotiations here in Bali, compromise or deadlock? De Boer replied, "On the brink of an agreement. Absolutely...
12/15/07 -
becker-posner - The growth of large government managed funds during the past few years has been spectacular. These funds are estimated to manage between $2-3 trillion, and their assets are increasing rapidly. Sovereign funds have grown mainly because of the run-up in fossil fuel and other commodity prices, although China is creating a large fund with the capital earned from its trade surplus in goods. If present...
12/15/07 -
Babalu Blog - Meet Manuel Benito del Valle. He’s a 29 year old Spaniard. He had an internship at the Spanish Institute of Exterior Commerce which entitled him to a diplomatic passport. He broke the cardinal rule of a Spaniard in Cuba, he broke the Apartheid Rule. He mingled and got friendly with the natives. According to his father, he had been warned not to mix with the “population and their sad...
12/14/07 -
FP Watch - Dr. Ahmad Yousuf, a senior advisor to Ismail Haniyeh (left), recently wrote an open letter to Condoleezza Rice calling for the Bush administration to engage in unconditional dialogue with Hamas. (Hat tip: Jeff Dexter) Couched in flowery diplomatic language, Yousuf's portrayal of Hamas is of a benign organization with only peaceful intentions. He writes: Many people make the mistake of...
12/14/07 -
Chris Blattman - The pundits say yes, but what do the data say? According to a Democracy Now interview with Columbia professor Mahmood Mamdani, climate change is a main driver of the conflict: From the late 1970s you have had a significant desertification, and you’ve been having in the north of Darfur basically a situation where people’s simply entire livelihoods are destroyed, and which has been...
12/14/07 -
Counter Terrorism Blog - On December 12 a top Lebanese Army commander, Brigadier General Francois Hajj, was killed in a Terrorist bombing in the suburb of Baabda southeast of Beirut. Hajj, 54, who was close to army commander Michel Sleiman and tipped to be his successor, was killed along with his bodyguard in a rush-hour blast. This was the first assassination of a high ranking officer of the Lebanese Armed Forces in...
12/12/07 -
FP Watch - Like a Slavic Mike Huckabee, Dmitri Medvedev has ascended to new prominence from the chaff of presidential candidates. As a Deputy Prime Minister, Mr. Medvedev was already on the short list for the Russian presidency, along with fellow Deputy PM Sergei Ivanov and Premier Viktor Zubkov. But after Mr. Zubkov’s surprising anointment as prime minister just months before the election, he seemed...
12/12/07 -
Ahmadinejad - In the Name of Almighty God, the All-Knowing, the Most Lovingly Compassionate One's perspective regarding government and governance determines the way one ‎should cooperate with the people. If one recognizes government as a privilege and prey ‎of the governors, then the period of governance can be counted as an opportunity to fulfill ‎the expectations of certain individuals and...
12/12/07 -
The Oil Drum - OECD European gas production looks set to peak in 2008. After that, falling production combined with rising demand will see OECD European gas imports wanting to rise from current 197 BCM per annum to 442 BCM per annum by 2020. Where will this gas come from and how will rising European imports affect N America and the rest of the world? Figure 1 OECD Europe gas production and conceptual forecast....
12/11/07 -
Russia Blog - One week ago Russians went to the polls to vote in national parliamentary elections. The result was hardly in doubt -- the United Russia Party of Russia's President Vladimir Putin swept to victory. Equally predictable was the reaction of most Western media to this largely foreordained result. We are told that Putin is reviving the Soviet Union and that he has been busy building a cult of personality...
12/11/07 -
3 Quarks Daily - Between northern Uganda and now Southern Sudan, heavily armed Nilotic pastoralists have been much on my plate these last two months. I wrote about Karamoja in November, a remote and volatile region of Uganda where life revolves around livestock, primarily the bovine variety. Tending and stealing cattle is how most Karamojong spend their time. I’m now in Southern Sudan where related Nilotic...
12/11/07 -
counter terrorism blog - Kosovo’s Albanian community leaders will likely unilaterally declare Kosovo’s secession and independence from Serbia in the next few weeks. This follows the failure of UN sponsored negotiations on Kosovo’s final status. This will not be a smooth separation and is likely to be accompanied by inter-ethnic violence and growing tension along Kosovo’s borders with all its neighbors. The...
12/10/07 -
Swamp Politics - Al Gore today recalled reading his "own political obituary'' seven years ago tomorrow -- he found in it "a judgment that seemed harsh and mistaken.'' Yet "the unwelcome verdict'' of the U.S. Supreme Court in the disputed Florida presidential election of 2000 also served as a "painful gift,'' the former vice president said today in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize. It was the gift of an...
12/10/07 -
sean's russia blog - And the winna is? Dmitry Medvedev. Putin named the young economic liberal as his presidential favorite in a meeting with United Russia leaders today. What is interesting is not so much what Putin chose, but what he didn’t choose. Putin didn’t choose the siloviki. He didn’t choose the economic nationalists. He didn’t choose the hawks. In Medvedev, Putin has endorsed someone’s...
12/10/07 -
Counter Terrorism Blog - While scattered clashes persist, the snows have come to the passes in the Qandil Mountains, effectively putting a stop to most, if not all activity by guerrillas of the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) attacking Turkey from Northern Iraq. This year, however, Turkish citizens should not feel as secure that the overall conflict has ebbed as usual simply because SE Turkey has “cooled off” militarily...
12/09/07 -
Jan's EUBlog - Moldovan president Voronin claims in an interview with the Financial Times today that “No country has united with another one after joining the EU. It can’t be done.” Apparently his Soviet apparatchik ignorance allows him to overlook the 1990 case of Germany. It was east Germany (the German Democratic Republic) that not only acceded to the Federal Republic of Germany on 3rd October 1990...
12/09/07 -
FP Watch - A couple of thoughts on the recent Russian Duma elections: First, and most obviously, this was a huge blow for Russian democrats. Putin's party, United Russia, pulled in over 60% of the vote and they now hold 2/3rds of the seats in parliament, enough to override the objections of all other dissenting parties. The only significant opposition party that got over the 7% threshold was the Communist...
12/09/07 -
Pajamas Media - ’ve been deeply upset ever since this teddy bear circus erupted. A few days ago, I was out with a bunch of friends trying my best to get my face unglued from my computer screen. As we were walking in laughter, we passed by a shop displaying a set of teddy bears, and for the first time the triggered emotion was a starkly different one. If anything, the whole spectacle further proves something...
12/08/07 -
Whirledview - As I jump up and down and chant “soft power,” “soft power,” “soft power,” I am reminded of that mantra’s weak links. I shudder to think about how many fundamental reforms are needed on the traditional and public diplomacy sides of America’s foreign policy house before this country’s “soft power” can truly be made effective again. That is providing the next administration eschews...
12/08/07 -
Barbados Underground - Sometimes when we read some of the comments posted on Barbados Underground or listen to comments in the wider public, we have had to seriously question the political maturity of our nation 41 years after Independence. We admit that no system of government is perfect. We have always admired that in North American and to a lesser extent the British systems of government, there always seem to be the...
12/07/07 -
Avuncular American - It's hard to keep up with "Speedy Sarkozy" (as Le Monde has taken to calling him), or my own appellation controlee "The Energizer Bunny." I was simply going to refer in this post to Sarkozy's speech on his return from Algiers, but I have to specify: his speech to French and Algerian French veterans on the injustices done over the 45 years since Algerian independence. Not his speech - very...
12/07/07 -
Long War Journal - The issue of Iranian complicity in the Iraqi insurgency has been contentious since US and Iraqi forces began heavily targeting the Iranian networks in late 2006. While news reports have touted Iran's role in reducing the violence, US military officers believe Iran still serves as a source of weapons and fighters in Iraq. The Long War Journal has spoken to several mid-level and senior US military...
12/07/07 -
Fist Full of Euros - Russia has been in the news over the last few days, as much as anything for its recent attempt at “unfair” (the term is the one used by the OCSE) elections. Both Alex and Doug have already commented on this (and Manuel Alvarez has a useful summary of the electoral system and the outcomes it produces here), so in this post, I would like to draw attention to another reason why Russia should be...
12/05/07 -
Jan’s EUblog - How Germany got the baltic sea pipeline - and with worse consequences as we watch it Filed Under EU politics, Greens, English | Bundestag closedThe pipeline issue has somehow been around for 2+ years by now but never really provoked a serious debate in Germany. It is one these strategic industry projects that receives the highest diplomatic and political blessings and no one really questions...
12/05/07 -
megan mcardle - OPEC has declined to raise its quotas, causing the price of oil to jump back towards $100. A few years ago, OPEC ministers were worried that prices were heading towards $50; they feared that this would lead to the kind of demand collapse that ravaged OPEC finances in the mid-eighties. Now the FT says price hawks, led by Venezuela, were arguing that "a price of $100 a barrel was fair."...
12/05/07 -
Daniel Venezuela - After half of the term for which the official was elected, a number not less than twenty percent of registered voters of the constituency may request the convening of a referendum to revoke his mandate. When equal or greater number of voters and voters who elected official have voted for the revocation, provided that the referendum has attended a number of electors and voters...
12/05/07 -
peak watch - Violence erupted in Iran last week when Ahmadinejad's government imposed gasoline rationing, limiting drivers to 100 litres (26.39 gallons) per month of petrol at the subsidized price of about $0.42 per gallon. Angry protesters burned gas stations as they denounced the belt-tightening measure and the politicians who imposed it (photo below, source). Sanctions on Iran, the Islamic Republic's policies,...
12/05/07 -
Fifty Viss - Today, I noticed a new addition to the Myanmar.com website, the official Burmese government portal. Titled “Photo @ Myanmar.com,” the page contains a series of images that attack the recent Burmese marches, the American government, Western media (particularly BBC, Voice of America and Radio Free Asia, three major radio broadcasters in Burma) and the War in Iraq. There are 14 slides, all...
12/05/07 -
sean's russia blog - Well, this breakdown in gains and losses puts things into perspective. Essentially, there will be no real difference between the 4th and 5th Dumas. The only notable difference is the restructuring of the legislature’s composition to reflect the 7 percent law. SPS leader Boris Nadezhdin told RFE/RL that the election means that Russia “is a different country now. We have returned to the Soviet...
12/04/07 -
Counterterrorism Blog - Several days ago, Germany signaled a crackdown on PKK elements there through the extradition of two men to Turkey. In return, Turkey might send a German citizen of Turkish origin, with suspected links with al-Qaeda, back to Germany. The Today's Zaman website reported that Germany extradited Mehmet İltaş and Mehmet Eşref Kızılay, both members of the PKK, and quoted Turkey's Justice Ministry...
12/04/07 -
FP Watch - Despite Praise for Elections, Reform Stagnating in Jordan Last Tuesday, November 20, Jordan held parliamentary elections to broad international acclaim. The vote was the second since Jordan's monarch, King Abdullah II, took power in 1999, and independent Jordanian observers certified the election as free and fair. Indeed, the elections went smoothly, a record number of female candidates competed...
12/04/07 -
Blogger News - Why, in a whole continent of failed countries is Zimbabwe the most tragic of them all? Under severe Western pressure, Rhodesia was forced to capitulate to Marxist terrorists, and Mugabe assumed power in 1980. During “independence” celebrations for the newly re-named Zimbabwe, two of Mugabe’s most active supporters – President Samora Machel of Mozambique, and President Julius Nyerere of...
12/03/07 -
Whirled View - I usually find non-fiction – or experiencing life itself – far more exciting than reading other people’s fictionalized versions of it. But considering the state of Russian politics these days, I’ve begun to wonder whether I shouldn’t haul out my copies of Alexander Zinoviev’s Radiant Future, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, and Yuriy Trifonov’s House on the Embankment...
12/03/07 -
Ablogistan - A new global ranking of 15-year old students' reading, math, and science abilities contains more bad news for the U.S. education system: American teenagers were below average in all categories and ranked 18th out of 30 in the tests, which were carried out in 57 countries that together account for nearly 90% of world GDP. Finland, China, and Canada took the top three spots. I didn't expect...
12/03/07 -
Brussels Journal - This move towards authoritarianism, Paul Belien argues in his book, […] is also why Belgium, a state in which private interests have historically superseded those of the public, is admired by the unelected bureaucrats who will control the looming European superstate. […] From the outset, Belgium was doomed to political instability. The Walloons, or French-speaking Belgians, resided in the...
12/01/07 -
Publius Pundit - putin-tsar.jpgThis coming Sunday, December 2nd, is shaping up to be the single most important day in Russian history, perhaps the last chance the people of Russia will ever have to show the world they don't want confrontation and can responsibly manage their nation. Up to 110 million eligible Russian voters will head to the polls to choose a new lower house of their legislature, called the...
12/01/07 -
Heritage Blogs - Iraqi politicians and celebrity groupies of Venezuelan Dictator Hugo Chávez should read Tina Rosenburg’s article in New York Times Magazine describing why oil-dependent countries are “poorer, more conflict-ridden, and despotic.” Oil exports push up the exchange rate, destroying jobs in other sectors and hindering the development of a middle class. Oil also concentrates wealth in the...
12/01/07 -
VOX - Pundits regularly invoke the notion of a world economy that is either “shrinking” or becoming “flat.” Explanations of this alleged flattening include technological innovations in transportation and communication that have enabled goods and ideas to flow more freely. The offshoring of service jobs, particularly call centers and computer software in India, has grabbed recent media attention....
11/30/07 -
Center for European Reform - The EU is getting tough on China. That, at least, is the impression one gets from high-ranking EU officials that arrived for the annual EU-China summit in Beijing this week. Economics is the main reason for Europe’s changing mood. The EU’s trade deficit with China is set to reach €170 billion this year, and European business is losing an estimated €55 million a day because of Chinese...
11/30/07 -
agonist - Ethiopia's Prime Minister Meles Zenawi has acknowledged that his troops cannot withdraw from the conflict in Somalia. Mr Meles said he had expected to withdraw his soldiers earlier in the year, after Islamists had been driven out of the Somali capital, Mogadishu. But he said divisions within the Somali government had left it unable to replace the Ethiopians, while not enough...
11/30/07 -
Defence of the Realm - The day after our post pointing out the extraordinary cost of Apache attack helicopters, it is rather ironic that Bernard Jenkin should publish a report on defence policy arguing for the Army to be equipped with more Apache helicopters. Thus writes Jenkin: The mountainous terrain of Afghanistan discouraged the deployment of Challenger 2s, and the Army have been much more dependent upon...
11/28/07 -
David Medinkritik - Not only did Der Spiegel not run a derisive cover on the Euro currency in its weaker days - it virtually gushed-over with propaganda-like enthusiasm at its introduction: Der Spiegel in 2002: Euroland The New Money Power Viewed in isolation - the Dollar cover might not be considered anti-American. Given the larger body of work of Der Spiegel over the past decade - however - it...
11/28/07 -
Road to Surfdom - The war that the Bush Administration and its hangers-on have been fighting in their heads for years now has many unusual characteristics. There is no defined enemy (just ‘The Enemy’), there are no designated opposing forces, there are no war aims and therefore no way of knowing if or when the war will have been won. These are not flaws in the war however but wonderfully useful...
11/28/07 -
Daniel Venezuela - Every election since I have started this blog I have dared to publish an electoral prediction. I have been usually proven wrong, but not that much. After all if I made a mistake on the margin through some last minute wishful thinking, I still gave Chavez winning by 5% last December. However one thing that I got pretty good has been the general regional trend, with rather good predictions on...
11/28/07 -
Russia Blog - While Americans are constantly having their eyes opened to the possibilities for growth and economic freedom in the People’s Republic of China, a far more free and open society in Russia is judged more harshly in the Western news media. Why is this? Is it because the shelves at Wal-Marts across America are not stocked with goods from Russia? Or is I simply because, as some cynical Russians imply,...
11/28/07 -
Michael Totten - “You're probably safer here than you are in New York City,” said Marine First Lieutenant Barry Edwards when I arrived in Fallujah. I raised my eyebrows at him skeptically. “How many people got shot at last night in New York City?” he said. “Probably somebody,” I said. “Yeah, probably somebody did,” he said. “Somewhere.” Nobody was shot last night in Fallujah. No American...
11/28/07 -
FPWatch - In the energy market, average consumers can function as a stabilizing force as oil prices reach unbearable new highs. Public outrage after gas lines at the pumps following the Arab oil embargo in the early '70s forced Congress' hand to set new fuel economy standards, requiring American automakers to manufacture cars featuring more miles to the gallon. Today, the bright side to the current trend...
11/26/07 -
Tony Sharp - In the early days of Gordon Brown's premiership he visited and made a speech to the United Nations in which he mentioned the need for action in Darfur. In Britain, Brown's speech was reported (wrongly) as if it was an almost single-handed success that pushed the international community into action over the genocide. Interestingly, there was barely any mention of France's co-sponsorship of...
11/26/07 -
Counter Terrorism Blog - Almost since the beginning of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq in late 2003, there has been an ongoing public debate about the significance and origins of foreign-born jihadists who have traveled to Iraq intent upon joining Al-Qaida and killing Americans and Muslim "apostates". Despite a veritable avalanche of evidence suggesting that these foreign fighters have had a disproportionate role in...
11/26/07 -
Pandagon - Sara Robinson linked to this fascinating photoessay of families around the world (chosen clearly for their “averageness”) standing by a table with a week’s worth of their food purchases on it. Sara displayed these two pictures that show the disparity in need between middle class Americans and refugees living in Chad. I recommend Sara’s thoughts on the issue of worldwide hunger,...
11/26/07 -
Uskowi on Iran - Ashofteh is best translated into English as chaotic. Ashofteh bazaar of Iranian politics is how Tehran’s influential daily Jomhouri Eslami (“Islamic Republic”) has described the state of politics under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The paper, widely believed to having close ties to Iran’s supreme leader, in a harsh attack on Iran’s president has accused him of behaving illegally...
11/26/07 -
sean's russia blog - Yesterday Putin was running late to a press conference with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi. The reason why his limo zipped from northern Moscow to the Kremlin? As Kommersant commentator Andrei Kolesnikov reveals the President’s tardiness was because he was recording an address to the nation to be aired on 29 November on Ostankino TV. Over the last week, Putin has been waging an aggressive...
11/26/07 -
Captains Quarters blog - The Hair Of The Balkan Dog With the status of Kosovo beginning to create a political firestorm in the Balkans, one might be tempted to rethink the actions that brought Europe to liberate the province and then occupy it without any thought of what should follow. Not Richard Holbrooke, one of the architects of the disintegration in the Balkans. He writes in the Washington Post that, like everything...
11/22/07 -
FP Watch - I agree: there is a place for traditional public diplomacy. Exchange programs, foreign broadcasting, and other tools of PD are helpful. But I would argue that they are only useful in a very limited way. Simply put, a smart foreign policy that emphasizes human rights and international law is the absolute best form of public diplomacy. The rest is just details. As the Bush administration has shown,...
11/22/07 -
Whirled View - The truth of the matter is that there is little that the US can do about Pakistan’s nuclear weapons if the worst happens. Probably the best course of action would be conventional bombing of the storage areas, which could destroy the weapons. Brave Special Forces actions into the midst of a large and chaotic country have little chance of succeeding. Cooperation of Pakistani armed forces would be...
11/22/07 -
Social Europe Blog - Transatlantic economic initiatives are of course not new. There were a number of projects in the past. The EU-US Economic Initiative of 2005 for instance went into a similar direction as the new framework. These previous initiatives were, however, largely without major effects because political positions, regulatory regimes and national interests proved too difficult to reconcile. This could however...
11/22/07 -
ALL THINGS PAKISTAN - Religious extremists in Pakistan can come from all walks of life but a sizeable chunk belongs to the poorer section of the society. Pakistani immigrants and expatriates living in the West also make up a significant portion. Why are these two groups more prone to religious extremism and terrorism? Was it that, time and again, they were discriminated against and shunted to silence? Did the exclusion...
11/22/07 -
this is zimbabwe - Reports are that their killers arrived at the farm on Wednesday evening dressed in Zimbabwe Army camouflage fatigues and that they were armed with AK-47 rifles. They beat up a maid and left her tied her up. They then forced someone else to lead them to the rhino pens where they viciously assaulted the guards whose job it was to watch over the vulnerable animals all day and all night. Amber, DJ and...
11/22/07 -
Van der Galiën - Whenever Armenians refer to the period of the mid 1890s it’s wise to keep the above quotes in mind. Armenians rebelled against the Ottoman government in the 19th century already and, according to Western sources, exaggerate the response of the Turkish Muslims in an attempt to get more Armenians to rebel and to get the Western powers to intervene on their behalf. That’s, of course, information...
11/20/07 -
Daniel Venezuela - Chavez must be feeling very confident about the result of December 2 vote. I do not know whether his polls tell him another story from what is developing lately here, or if the CNE has already programmed the result wished for in the Smartmatic machines but in the middle of a delicate electoral campaign he travels to Chile and then to Saudi Arabia and Europe. Or perhaps he senses that the only...
11/20/07 -
Rear Echelon - The primary unit in the operation is the 209th Afghan National Army Corps with up to 900 soldiers deployed, along with its embedded Bundeswehr advisors. Germany also supplied recon forces, medical support and logistics units with up to 300 soldiers deployed. Additionally, some 260 Norwegian soldiers were deployed (including the RC(N) QRF from Mazar-e-Sharif), as well as Italian units and other,...
11/20/07 -
michael yon - I talked with some of the Iraqi boys between the ages of about 7 and 14. A 9-year-old—at least, I think he was 9—told me he likes to read. When I asked what he likes to read, he said, “Superman.” And then he told me how Superman wears a mask. Ice and I said that Superman does not wear a mask. I pointed to the Indian Head patch on an American soldier’s arm and said Superman wears that patch....
11/20/07 -
megan mcardle - With both countries growing so fast, it's tempting to view Cambodia as just a few rungs down the economic development ladder from Vietnam. One's heart longs to say, in fifteen years they'll be Vietnam; in 25, China; in 40, Japan. But this is one of the great fallacies of development economics. The development in Vietnam is palpably organic. There are a huge number of bottlenecks, particularly...
11/20/07 -
China Law Blog - The Humannaught started it off in his post, "Am I a Racist?" He concludes that though he may be an asshole, he is not a racist. I have read enough of Ryan's posts to concur with his assessment regarding racism and even to dispute his assessment regarding his being an asshole. I will say though that I had a prurient interest in his little tiff with Shanghai shopgirl. Being the father of a teenager...
11/20/07 -
jeffe manuel - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stepped up to the microphone on Thursday to publicly deny that the significant military progress made in Iraq this year has actually taken place at all. “Every place you go you hear about no progress being made in Iraq,” the AP quoted the Nevada Democrat – who has clearly taken great care to avoid going to “every place” where people who actually know...
11/19/07 -
Informed Comment - Politics of Reporting on IAEA Reports It is always interesting to read the actual text of reports issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding Iran not only because of what they reveal about Iran’s program, but also because of the interestingly partial way various news organizations and governments end up interpreting or representing the report to audiences they are sure...
11/19/07 -
Foreign Policy Watch - Be careful what you wish for. If there were totally free elections in many of the countries we're talking about today, the Islamic Jihad or the Islamic Brotherhood would win 85 percent of the vote. That's not a great outcome for us at this point either. There are numerous problems with this assertion. In his defense, earlier in the debate Dodd had a great answer to a question about...
11/19/07 -
Renegade Eye - There is no doubt that Cuba has suffered at the hands of the USA since the blockade was imposed. Yet despite being starved of essential resources the Cuban people have demonstrated a remarkable resilience and inventiveness. As they say here: "Todo se resuelve." Everything will be solved. When you walk around the streets of the capital, you can see examples everywhere of this creativity in...
11/16/07 -
The Van Der Galiën Gazette - Something has been bugging me for a while now, but I never really took the time to write my thoughts down about the subject that’s bugging me. Every day something comes up - news, controversies, etc. - which diverts the attention from the ‘bigger issues.’ Today, however, I decided to spend less time watching and reading the news and, instead, write down my thoughts on what I consider...
11/16/07 -
Beninm Wangi - It seemed like the time was right for me to pen this post about trade -vs- aid. This is a discussion that has a tremendous amount of relevance in Sub Saharan Africa. But it is also relevant in other parts of the world where developing economies are predominate. Now of course the concept of nations climbing out of the low income status by trade is not a new one. In fact the concept has been...
11/16/07 -
The American Scene - The Financial Times has just published a tremendously insightful op-ed on the real size of the Chinese economy. Albert Keidel, drawing on work done by the Asian Development Bank, observes that because “China had never participated in the careful price surveys needed to convert accurately its gross domestic product into PPP dollars,” the size of the Chinese economy under PPP has been exaggerated...
11/16/07 -
Demography Matters - First off, a quick apology to regular readers for my rather protracted absence. This has been due to lack of time rather than lack of interest, but then I guess you all know what that feels like. The topic of this post is Argentina, and it is a timely one, since Argentina just had some reasonably well publicized elections. Argentina has also been in the news to some extent for the rather shabby...
11/16/07 -
Whirled View - Finally. Some common sense. Thank you, Admiral William Fallon for leading the public relations charge that challenges the neocons’- as per usual - hawkish and ill-grounded rapacious rhetoric threatening Iran with US military attacks if Ahmadinejad doesn’t roll over and play scratch-my-tummy like Lizzie, my boxer, used to do when she wanted human attention. I’ve been hearing for several...
11/16/07 -
Peak Food - For European farmers, the last few years have seen remarkable fluctuations in profitability. When IACS was first introduced, payments were supposed to compensate us for being exposed to lower world prices. But for a few years (because world prices were high) we managed both the payments and the high prices. Of course, it couldn’t last, and grain prices declined until even the most efficient...
11/15/07 -
Read Write Web - A 17-year-old Dutch teenager was arrested by very real police for allegedly stealing over $5800 worth of virtual furniture to trick out his pad in online world Habbo Hotel. Five other teenagers were questioned in connection with the virtual crime spree, according to the BBC. Habbo, which attracts more than 6 million users in over 30 countries each month, is comparable to Second Life in that people...
11/14/07 -
Phronesisaical - Branko Milanovic here suggests that globalization increases corruption - the bug-a-boo of much recent international development work at places like the World Bank and IMF. Corruption is a serious issue when it redirects distribution of assistance and distorts necessary processes of institutional reconstruction. But it's an accusation that's also used as a crutch, or a smokescreen for other failed...
11/14/07 -
Zimpundit - I've always found it baffling when people (particularly westerners,) discover with shock and a degree of condescension that Mugabe has, and dare I say it, remains deeply beloved by many a Zimbabwean. Fact; the quality of life of the majority of my countrymen downright plummeted during and since our colonization by the British. Oh please, you really want to tell me you believe that hogwash about...
11/13/07 -
Washington Bureau - A battlefield whiff is already in the air before the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games. It’s not about sports either. It’s about publicity and spin and image and all those other crass things that seem to cut to the core of the modern Olympics. There’s a big dose of fear in there, too, to match China’s rightly deserved confidence that the Games (the sporting part, that is) will go well....
11/13/07 -
Intellibriefs - The Newly elected President Cristina Kirchner will face a tough job trying to keep Argentina's economic growth at the current pace, while dealing with internal demands for better socio-economic conditions, the evolution of the regional scenario and external pressure over the bonds issue. ...
11/13/07 -
England Expects - Amid widespread public protest and President Zatlers´ recommendation that the Government step down, Prime Minister Kalvitis ("People´s party", EPP-ED) and his four party coalition* have agreed last week to resign on the 5 December. The government had stayed on to in order to ensure the adoption of the surplus budget. Any new government is unlikely to change the broad-based support for the...
11/12/07 -
Democracy Arsenal - In response to the autocracy-terrorism link that Stephen McInerney and I discuss in our recent TNR article on Saudi Arabia, Michael van der Galien brings up some good points, which I'll try to address in this post: Could we also say that oppressive regimes exist in [Arab] countries because there are many radicals there? In other words, do extremists force governments to ignore human...
11/12/07 -
Megan McArdle - Vietnam is unbelievably picturesque. At least here in Hanoi, there are loads of women still wearing those pointy straw hats, and presumably not just because they know how much the Western tourists enjoy all this authenticity. The streets are also filled with women carrying baskets suspended on the ends of traditional yokes, such as the one pictured at right. The cognitive dissonance inspired...
11/12/07 -
Global Issues - It’s politically sensitive, but it’s going to happen. Some people don’t want to hear this, and it sure isn’t in vogue, but—absolutely—we’re going to fight in space. We’re going to fight from space and we’re going to fight into space. That’s why the US has development programs in directed energy and hit-to-kill mechanisms. We will engage terrestrial targets someday—ships,...
11/12/07 -
Defence of the Realm - And so it is that The Sunday Telegraph today headlines, "MoD in £1bn battle to stay within budget", while The Sunday Times has, "MoD planning massive cuts to plug £2bn gap". In its own self-regarding way, The Telegraph could not resist having its defence correspondent, Sean Rayment, preening that, "The Sunday Telegraph has learnt," in order to tell us: "Military chiefs plan to shelve...
11/12/07 -
sean's russia blog - Oil prices creep to $100 a barrel is “fueling one of the biggest transfers of wealth in history” reports the Washington Post. And the cash windfall, which is estimated at $4 to $5 billion more than five years ago is filling the coffers of oil export nations, while threatening social unrest, high prices, inflation, and economic stagnation in consumer nations. All of this signals that there is...
11/12/07 -
Whirledview - Today the MSM finally comes around to considering the fate of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. The nuclear arsenal, of course, has been President Musharraf's ace in the hole. The United States must guarantee nuclear Pakistan's stability, or who knows where those nukes might go? Add to this the world's most famous free-enterprise nuclear proliferator, A. Q. Khan, now under house arrest in Pakistan...
11/10/07 -
PSA Online - The outlook is looking increasingly gloomy for democracy in Pakistan. Our erstwhile ally in the war on terror, General Musharraf is looking worse by the day. After he took power in a bloodless coup in 1999, many Pakistanis were hopeful about the future. They were happy to be rid of a corrupt leader and willing to take a chance on Musharraf. Polls indicate, however, that they have soured...
11/10/07 -
Uskowi On Iran - Addressing a crowd gathered in Birjand, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said today that despite warnings of a military attack, Iran has built 3,000 uranium enrichment centrifuges. “The nation stood firm, we started with a cascade of 164 centrifuges… They [the West] shouted a bit…They said: Stop at 164. Don’t move forward… At one point messages were being sent to Iran suggesting...
11/10/07 -
Barbados Underground - As a woman who has visited Barbados on many occasions it is with deep regret that the population is highly educated, purchase great houses and luxurious cars. Yet there is minimal discussion surrounding the rights of the girl child and women in Barbados. I do find in Barbadian society there i...
11/08/07 -
Russia Blog - There is no doubt that President Putin was given the royal treatment by the Iranians, and several executives from Gazprom were represented in the presidential delegation. Even so, Russian journalists traveling with President Putin experienced first-hand what it’s like to live in a Muslim country ruled by a theocratic regime. The Iranian Ministry of Culture did not assign a bureaucrat to supervise...
11/08/07 -
Cato at liberty - Specifically, all three articles make a compelling case for a new direction that is less dependent upon America acting as the world’s policeman; would expect and demand more of America’s allies; and would place fewer demands on our nation’s military. This new strategy would enable us to reduce overall defense spending to pre-9/11 levels, a position supported by more than 4 in 10 Americans....
11/08/07 -
fpwatch - Afghanistan now produces more than 90% of the world's opium, and production continues to increase at an exponential rate, opening the sluce gates of the global black market. Increasingly, the opium trade has become a key source of revenue for the Taliban, particularly within their stronghold areas, where the group can tax the crop. As the International Crisis Group (among others) has noted, corrupt...
11/07/07 -
Whirled View - I never had to serve in Vietnam - let alone CORDS Vietnam* - although I know any number of Foreign Service Officers who did. Today’s PRTS, or provincial reconstruction teams, are supposedly the Iraq and Afghanistan equivalents of CORDS. But, as David Passage points out in an article in the November 2007 issue of the Foreign Service Journal, that’s where the resemblance ends. The article...
11/07/07 -
Long War Journal - The Taliban have pulled off the largest suicide attack in Afghanistan since the US overthrew the Taliban government in late 2001. A pair of suicide bombers targeted a parliamentary delegation as it visited a sugar factory in the northern province of Baghlan. Over 90 were reported killed, including five members of parliament, and over 50 have been wounded. A local doctor said the casualties may...
11/07/07 -
The Return Of Scipio - It has been awhile since my last serving of ‘Short Takes.’ I write these when there is no time for long and erudite epistles on this or on that, or when there many doings in the world that simply beg for witty commentary. Today is like that. Besides, I have a mountain of student essays to grade—and I must keep those guys and dolls content. So… I see where China plans to ban...
11/07/07 -
Russia Blog - With so many global conflicts, from Nigeria to the Phillipines, fueled by enmity between Christians and Muslims, Russia still has something to teach the world about peaceful coexistence and tolerance between the world's two largest religions. During the Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoons controversy last year, even as some British Islamic clerics publicly called for the beheading of the offending...
11/07/07 -
IPS Blog - An important indication of where the balance of power within the administration stands vis-a-vis Iran policy was likely to emerge by the end of October when a decision was due on whether to release the five Irnaians held by U.S. forces in Iraq since they were seized in a raid on the de facto Iranian consulate in Irbili last January 10. I argued that if they were freed, it would strongly suggest that...
11/07/07 -
FP Watch - It's the media, political party activists, pro-democracy lawyers and others who are being targeted; it's not the Taliban and other radical militants. As Arif Rifaq notes in The Baltimore Sun today, Musharraf has somehow conflated the political opposition and the Taliban as an equally dangerous force. Barnett Rubin, blogging from Pakistan, notes the irony that opposition activists (and not radical...
11/06/07 -
La Contra Revolucion - It’s frustrating to sit on this side of the puddle and wonder why the Cubans living on the other side just don’t do something. Anything! Ok, so some kids wore some “cambio” bracelets and got arrested. Quietly. Big deal! Have you seen the protests in Venezuela? The hell with bracelets. We need protests like those. Thousands screaming with signs, tear gas, rubber bullets, brutality,...
11/06/07 -
All Things Pakistan - As I wrote yesterday, the emergency declared by Gen. Musharraf is deeply disturbing, but not really surprising. The horrendous political situation that Gen. Musharraf described in his ‘Emergency’ speech is, in fact, true. Extremism and violence has gone out of hand. Society is deeply divided. Religion has been high-jacked and is now routinely used to incite violence. The writ of the...
11/06/07 -
The Van Der Galiën Gazette - Two Shiites who used to work for the Iraqi government (Health Ministry) will go on trial. They’re accused of helping Shiite militias kill Sunni patients and visitors to the hospital. Before the news broke that these two were probably involved in it, many Sunnis already said that doctors who would treat Sunnis issued death threats against them and would rip intravenous lines from “patients’...
11/04/07 -
Small Wars Journal - To enable one country to appreciate what another people really thinks and desires is both the most difficult and the most vital task which confronts us. -- John Bagot Glubb, Britain and the Arabs: A Study of Fifty Years 1908-1958, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1959), p. 147 As military units prepare for service in the Middle East, it is not uncommon for them to consult the published...
11/04/07 -
Foreign Policy Watch - The Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Saud Al-Faisal recently told the Middle East Economic Digest (11/1/2007; $$) that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states - Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, UAE, Oman, and Qatar - would be willing to offer low enriched uranium (LEU) via a consortium open to Iran and other Middle Eastern states, in a bid to dampen tensions in the region and fears of a possible...
11/04/07 -
Phronesisaical - Most often, nationalization [of oil and gas resources] is a reaction to the idea that the thief is a foreign company. For populist leftists, El Petroleo es Nuestro! — the oil is ours — is an alluring slogan. Now as the record high price of oil has made exploitation worthwhile even in places that are remote or geologically complicated (Chad comes to mind), more underdeveloped countries...
11/02/07 -
The Moderate Voice - Chinese President Hu Jintao has left the world guessing as to his foreign policy beliefs by playing his cards very close to the chest at the 17th National Congress of the Chinese Communist party. The Congress is the forum where the rulers of China gather to establish their pecking order and set policy guidelines for the next few years. His only visible move was to consolidate his power for the...
11/02/07 -
EU Referendum - Why is it impossible to keep at least Mugabe out, given that the common position of the EU, that bedrock of the planned common foreign policy is that the man, his friends and relations as well as various henchmen should not be allowed anywhere in the European Union? Because other African leaders have said that unless their chum Robert is invited they will not come. Of course, this says something...
11/02/07 -
jammie wearing fool - No doubt all the punks in Che t-shirts are organizing protests over this gross violation of human rights. The joys of communism are in full bloom in Caracas. The American left and media are completely ignoring the struggle for freedom in Venezuela. Today, thousands of students marched against thug dictator Hugo Chavez, and an ugly scene ensued. Democrats will walk to the end of the earth...
11/02/07 -
Uskowi On Iran - Iranian political leaders and military commanders are increasingly warning the nation of an upcoming war with the US. Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani today warned Iran of “unprecedented” US threats. “The movements and the presence of US forces and their supporters in the region are unprecedented, as is the creation of a menacing climate of fear," Rafsanjani told military commanders in...
11/01/07 -
Ipezone - The UN World Tourism Organization recently held a conference on the topic of "Climate Change and Tourism" in Davos, Switzerland. (There are seemingly endless UN subunits dedicated to various issues.) The issues behind climate change and tourism are straightforward to understand but not to solve: While tourism is a good source of income--especially for developing countries--handling tourists and...
11/01/07 -
Captains Quarters blog - Eli Lake offers a recap of the Democratic approach to Iran, calling it the "ask nicely" approach. Leading Democrats in Congress and in the presidential primaries have latched onto the word "diplomacy" as if it has never been tried with Teheran. They offer no reason to hope that another round of sweet talk alone would have any more success than previous attempts: Finally, at least for...
10/31/07 -
Ending Poverty - Three things stand out. First, almost 27% of 10-year olds never enrolled. This number is much smaller in India. Second, among those enrolled, the grade-distribution is crazy—5.9% are in Grade 1, 11.1% in Grade 2 and only 18.5% are in the correct age-grade combination. Third, even those who are in the correct grade are performing far below curricular standards—only 36% of those in Grade 4 can...
10/31/07 -
fistful of euros - Jamie Kenny and Nosemonkey wonder why Labour is pro-EU. Enlarging on this post a little, I think it’s worth looking at some data. I suspect the data support that post. For example, despite all the bashing, a solid majority supports EU membership and has done consistently over time. Further, the public does not worry very much about Europe; some 4 per cent according to a recent poll. However,...
10/31/07 -
mark mackinnon - It was a nightmare moment: after a highly lubricated Moscow evening with two visiting Canadian friends, we piled into a cab (actually, random Lada that pulled over and agreed to my price for a ride from Lubyanka Square to Oktyabrskaya metro station) and turned down one of the back streets of Kitai-Gorod. Moments later, a member of the hated, baton-wielding GAI, the traffic police, waved us down....
10/31/07 -
global economy does matter - In many ways this is somehow typical of Argentine social and political life, the devil is always, or nearly always in the details, and the devil, in one form or another, is never, it seems, far away. As outgoing President Néstor Kirchner is quoted as saying at one point "It's not easy work helping Argentina find it's way out of hell, but in these past four years we've shown that it's absolutely...
10/31/07 -
slacktivist - American air strikes can be impressively accurate. Gen. Norman Schwartzkopf made that point repeatedly and effectively during his frequent press briefings in the first Gulf War. He loved to show one particular piece of video, which appeared to show a U.S. missile being fired down a chimney with pinpoint deadly aim. The primary intended audience for Schwartzkopf's briefings was not the millions...
10/31/07 -
Kafr al-Hanadwa - The act of eating is rarely free of moral and social significance in Hinduism, which defines foods as more or less “pure” according to the violence used to obtain them or their potential to arouse the “base passions,” among other things; upper caste vegetarianism is seen as a sign of spiritual advancement and concerns about caste purity and pollution are frequently expressed in terms of...
10/29/07 -
Joshua Pundit - Syria's Basher Assad seems to have a unique genius for getting caught having his dirty deals come to light. His latest fumble involves the clandestine nuclear deal with North Korea. And it might just have torpedoed Condi Rice's ambitious scramble for a personal foreign policy legacy no matter what the costs. Apparently Assad has his personal fingerprints all over Damascus’ nuclear deal...
10/29/07 -
Captains Quarters Blog - With Nicolas Sarkozy at the helm of government, relations between the US and France have warmed considerably. Sarkozy has adopted the American position on Iran and now leads European efforts to demand accountability from Teheran on their nuclear program. Can a French return to NATO be far behind? Not according to Ronald Asmus, who oversaw a close-run attempt ten years ago: French President...
10/29/07 -
Brussels Journal - One of the greatest injustices to the victims of racism, and in particular the holocaust, is the trivialization of it. One does not have to agree with the Dutch “Islamophobic” anti-immigration politicians Geert Wilders or Rita Verdonk, but what kind of person writes something like: “Whenever I see people such as Wilders and Verdonk I think of the Kristallnacht! The moment the Jews were...
10/29/07 -
Abu Aardvark - I've been absolutely fascinated watching the unfolding debate in the jihadist forums and various Arab media about what happened with al-Jazeera and bin Laden's Iraq address. Some things that I've been reading about the episode are just wrong. This is not the first time that al-Jazeera has angered al-Qaeda. The jihadist forums routinely lambast al-Jazeera, along with the other Arab media...
10/29/07 -
fistfu lof euros - Despite having read mountains (appropriately) of reporting on the Turkish-Kurdish-Iraqi crisis, I haven’t read anyone who has tried to answer the big question - why do the PKK seem to be doing everything possible to provoke the Turks into invading Iraq after them? You’d think this was a pretty vital issue; who wants to be blitzed, after all? Fortunately, Handelsblatt does journalism; Gerd...
10/28/07 -
the space review - Now that the National Security Space Office’s (NSSO) space solar power study has been released and shows that the technology is well within America’s grasp, a set of decisions have to be made concerning how the US government should proceed. The idea that the government should fund a series of demonstration projects, as the study recommends, is a good place to start. Another aspect should be to...
10/27/07 -
Whirled View - In 2000, Colombia competed with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for domination of the US headlines. Colombian drug lords, leftist guerrillas, and rightist paramilitaries were portrayed as running rampant. The US initiated “Plan Colombia” a multi-pronged five year approach to help stabilize the war-torn country. The five year follow-on, “Plan Colombia II” is now in progress. What does this...
10/27/07 -
The Moderate Voice - In Burma, I’m told Than Schwe’s shame is that he orders soldiers raised as Buddhists to violate their vows to never hurt another sentient being. That Than Schwe not only lives out his evil ideals; in perverting Buddhism, he works hard to corrupt the young as well. Than Schwe has to bribe the young men to do his bidding. They do their grisly work not out of loyalty to Than Schwe, but because...
10/27/07 -
La Russophobe - The Russian economy has been showing a shaky, creaking vulnerability of late that is surprising even to the jaundiced, cynical observers here at La Russophobe. Despite the fact that the price of oil has soared to stratospheric new highs in recent weeks, approaching $100 per barrel, when the American stock market took a 500-point, 2.5% hit to the Dow Jones Industrial Average last week, famously...
10/26/07 -
Sultan Knish - If there was one stable leg in the tripod of Iraq's Sunni-Shia-Kurd, it was the Kurds. The Kurdish areas were relatively stable and peaceful. The Kurdish leadership was generally pro-American. Among the debris of the Shia-Sunni infighting, it was an oasis. So of course that oasis had to be brought down. And now Turkey's Islamist government is coordinating with Iran and Syria for an assault on Kurdish...
10/26/07 -
Awkward Utopia - …and so do I! Why in the world they have been so virulently anti-Zionist escapes me. The profound disgust with many groups of Israeli society and the total ignorance of motivations for why people act they way they do astounds me. How can it be that so many groups gain sympathy from this newspaper, but Israelis simply do not? I wonder what the real reason is, for so tired and loathsome a campaign...
10/26/07 -
China Rises - China warned the United States last week that there would be consequences for Washington’s warm reception for the visiting Dalai Lama. Now payoff time has come. China has cancelled a visit late this month by Wu Bangguo, the titular No. 2 in the Communist Party and chairman of the National People’s Congress. Wu would have been the most important Chinese dignitary to travel to Washington...
10/24/07 -
Balkinization - Hu’s amendment, the “scientific outlook on development,” joins a long line of enigmatic slogans that have been added into China’s most recent constitution. The constitution, which can be read in English here without the most recent amendments, is the PRC’s fourth and was adopted in 1982 during the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. After five sessions of amendments, the constitution...
10/24/07 -
gates of vienna - Email Us Dymphna's other blog Norm Interview #94: Dymphna Add Gates of Vienna to Technorati Favorites » Blogs that link here Powered by Technorati Gates of Vienna at Café Press Gates of Vienna Marketplace Join the Art Project! Holger Danske Vågner The Center for Vigilant Freedom The 910 Group Jamaat ul-Fuqra Virginia Part...
10/24/07 -
worlds fair - Lately, I've been thinking a lot about good old 0.7%. This is the hallmark figure suggested by Pearson as a target for foreign aid to developing nations. In other words, the main idea is that wealthy nations do something nice and set aside about 0.7% of the gross domestic product, so that the sorts of things that the UN Millennium Development Goals are focused on, can be proactively tackled. Problem...
10/23/07 -
Blackfive - Perhaps my praise for Al-Reuters was a bit hasty.... I had a feeling that I might be a bit premature on that. First, some background. 100_0490_2This is the village of Orgun (pronounced or GOON Mr. Sparkle). It really is a pretty nice place that is only about 12 miles (as the crow flies) from the Afghanistan/Pakistan border and for it is the center of a great many operations to...
10/23/07 -
Bajan - The discussion coming out of our article on HIV/AIDS last Wednesday has yet again caused us to place the Church under the microscope, and to question the fading role which it is playing in our society. There was a time when the majority of young people could be found at Sunday school involved in one or several activities within the church; youth groups, singing in the choir, Church Lads Brigade,...
10/23/07 -
MVDG - Turkey truly seems to be preparing for war: “An AP Television News cameraman saw a convoy of 50 Turkish army vehicles, loaded with soldiers and weapons, including 155-mm howitzers, heading from the southeastern town of Sirnak toward Uludere, closer to the border.” Turkey’s Foreign Minister Ali Babacan said that Turkey still prefers a diplomatical solution, but that the Turks want to see...
10/22/07 -
Van der Galiën - Meanwhile our media ignore the obvious and pretend that this was merely an ‘incident.’ That Bilal shouted something “in Arabic” when he tried to kill the female police officer is probably a coincidence. Our political leaders are doing the same and encourage newspapers and news networks to pretend as if the Moroccan-Dutch youths burning down cars every night since Bilal was deservedly shot...
10/22/07 -
river bend - Syria is a beautiful country- at least I think it is. I say “I think” because while I perceive it to be beautiful, I sometimes wonder if I mistake safety, security and normalcy for ‘beauty’. In so many ways, Damascus is like Baghdad before the war- bustling streets, occasional traffic jams, markets seemingly always full of shoppers… And in so many ways it’s different. The buildings are...
10/22/07 -
fpwatch - Interestingly, despite the Brotherhood's rhetorical support for representative government, respect for minorities, and non-discrimination towards women, the current draft of their party platform takes a very divergent direction from these worthy goals. One of the most controversial aspects would establish a Higher Ulema Council (HUC) to monitor (and perhaps veto) legislation that does not fit with...
10/22/07 -
China Bystander - Hu Rolls On The party congress went much as scripted. The surprise would have been if it hadn’t. President Hu Jintao got his “scientific concept of development” enshrined in the constitution, continuing the tradition of each leader adding his own embellishment to the country’s guiding principles. He also cleared the way for reshaping the party’s politburo standing committee — the...
10/22/07 -
Brussels Journal - Europeans are hoping a new European Union treaty will help raise their profile in international affairs. But unless European elites bring their postmodern fantasies about the illegitimacy of military “hard power” into line with the way the rest of the world interprets reality, Europe is unlikely to have much of a global voice at all. Indeed, after years of overselling the efficacy of...
10/22/07 -
Debatable Land - People often note that there appears to be a more vigorous debate over Israel's approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict in the mainstream Israeli press than there is in the mainstream American press. This is, however, the kind of judgment that it's hard for a casual American observer to make with much confidence. Writing in International Security, however, Jerome Slater takes a more systematic...
10/19/07 -
WPR Blog - First, as mentioned, Israel does need Turkey as an ally in the Middle East. Turkey has an enormous population, and secular government, both of which make Israel, and its American lobbyists hesitant to risk any controversy. Second, if the resolution passes, any resulting furor in Turkey would probably include at a minimum furious resentment toward Turkey's Jewish population, and more probably...
10/19/07 -
US Food Policy - Farm subsidies used to be criticized for encouraging overproduction of major row crops, such as corn, wheat, soybeans, and cotton, because farmers could earn more subsidies by growing more of the crop. The overproduction harmed the environment and immiserated poor farmers in developing countries by suppressing world prices for these crops. To partly -- and only partly -- remedy these problems,...
10/19/07 -
sajshirazi - A rickshaw driver usually adorns his rickshaw with a multiple array of reflective mirrors. If a ray of light enters a rickshaw once, it gets trapped and it takes a while for it to get out after being internally reflected many times. These mirrors are placed by the driver to his own strategic advantage. If a passenger is to his liking then these mirrors help the driver to keep an eye on the passenger...
10/18/07 -
Samizdata - How total surveillance works and does not work The ubiquity of surveillance cameras in Britain does not appear to be having any very detectable effect upon the level of crime. Well, actually, that is not quite right. Total surveillance does dissuade the law-abiding from straying across the line. Surveillance cameras do slow up speeding motorists, for instance. But with one exception. They...
10/18/07 -
FP Watch - The words 'feminism' and 'Middle East' are not often used in the same sentence. But, increasingly, women in the Arab world are beginning to demand greater authority for themselves in their societies. Interestingly, it's not secular or liberal groups that are effectively leading the way in pushing forward on women's rights issues; instead, it is Muslim women, involved in conservative Islamist...
10/18/07 -
Uskowi On Iran - The news surrounding the summit of the heads of states of Caspian Sea region in Tehran and the coverage of the summit meeting dominated the coverage in Iranian media. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s trip to Tehran began with a report on a plot to assassinate him while attending the Caspian summit. The summit ended without approving a treaty on the legal status of the Caspian Sea. At stake...
10/18/07 -
Social Sense - Affection among heads of state is rare, but it does happen. Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill formed a warm, lasting relationship during World War II, and Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher were fast friends. More recently, George Bush declared that he was able to see Vladimir Putin’s soul and pronounced him “a good man,” and I find this very enlightening. How fortunate we are to have...
10/18/07 -
Plumer - For the past 20 years, the World Bank and assorted Western governments have been telling Malawi how to conduct its affairs. Stop subsidizing crop prices. Curtail spending. Float your currency. And so on. More recently, in 2000, donors demanded that Malawi dismantle a fledgling program that subsidized fertilizer for poor farmers--who often can't afford it on their own--on the grounds that the...
10/16/07 -
Driving Too Fast - It may seem hard, at a glance, to figure which is the more ridiculous headline: That a soldier’s mother shipped 80,000 cans of silly string to Iraq or that Libya and Vietnam won seats on the UN Security Council. But given that the answer for the silly string question came to mind quickly with some consideration and has a practical purpose - it can detect trip wires - the winner in this one is...
10/16/07 -
Campaign Diaries - Turkey is threatening to invade Iraq and cut commercial ties with the United States in retaliation of the House Foreign Affairs Committee passing a resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide. And it looks like House members are giving in to this blatant blackmail instead of seeing that Turkish threats to cut off help for the Iraq War is just further proof that something is deeply perverted in the...
10/16/07 -
RH Reality Check - Who will save children from marriages and sexual abuse? It was a big story in the United States of America when a man was convicted for marrying off a fourteen-year-old girl to her nineteen-year-old cousin. The man is Warren Jeffs (51), the leader of a Mormon sect group. Jeffs could get life in prison after a trial that threw a spotlight on a renegade community along the Arizona-Utah line...
10/15/07 -
Registan - Unfortunately this is poking a hole in one of the primary ways we’ve innovated maintaining control due to the personnel shortage: the reliance upon personalities. In one major way this was unavoidable, as personalities, rather than policies, had come to define Afghan politics. But the lack of repeatable, sustainable policies in the last six years (just about exactly, in fact) has meant that every...
10/15/07 -
sybil star - The first four are tiny islands of a sort, if you can count land-locked Switzerland as an island in the middle of that sea of European Union members. And actually Hong Kong, too, is not just the island itself--detail that I had ignored up to this moment. The whole territory is called the "Hong Kong Special Administrative Region" and includes Hong Kong island, Kowloon, the New Territories, and the...
10/15/07 -
2 Blowhards - I've come to be fond of Italy. But, as suggested above, it took a while. A number of factors came into play, yet I suspect that a key one is generational. I don't remember when I was first made aware of Italy, though it might have been in the early post-World War 2 years (by the time I was conscious that "there was a war on," Italy was already out of it and, to me, the enemies were Hitler and...
10/15/07 -
Back Talk - They forgot to mention that al Qaeda threatened another Ramadan offensive this year, and they also neglected to mention the primary role played by al Qaeda in Iraq (which involves inciting -- not participating in -- a civil war), but at least they did not adopt the eerie code of silence (or the eerie code of denial) about al Qaeda in Iraq that characterizes the position of leading Democrats (virtually...
10/15/07 -
babalu blog - Fidel castro derives his power from propaganda, which is what keeps his image as a benevolent dictator alive in the international community. The regime has had 48 years of practice of telling people outside what they want to hear. And mainly that means talking about how a perfect egalitarian society does exist and it's just 90 miles away from the terrible imperialist, capitalist United States of...
10/15/07 -
fistful of euros - The interesting thing here is that he lines up with a US hard-right view in government that any kind of multilateral agreement with binding force is unacceptably oppressive, but frames it as being directed at individuals in the US; how responsible, I wonder, are the more prominent people who agreed with him in the 1990s for the Bush administration’s lawlessness? To some extent, the drive to reject...
10/12/07 -
Michael Totten - In late July when I visited a police station in the town of Mushadah just north of Baghdad I worried that Iraq was doomed to become the next Gaza. As many as half the police officers, according to most of the American Military Police who worked as their trainers, were Al Qaeda sympathizers or agents. The rest were corrupt lazy cowards, according to every American I talked to but one. No one tried...
10/12/07 -
carpet blog - Couples sit beneath the reddening grape arbor, sipping tea in the garden beneath the minaret of the green Firuzaga mosque. On every corner, greasy doner kebabs slowly rotate in front of glowing orange heat panels, providing a quick lunch to doctors in white coats from the nearby public hospital. Tobacco smoke mixes with car exhaust on Sirasilever Caddesi. The casual observer of my Istanbul neighborhood...
10/12/07 -
Ending Poverty - Not only has it scored at or near the bottom of Transparency International's corruption perception index, but Bangladesh also scores in the bottom quartile of many of the Worldwide Governance Indicators. Yet this same country has seen its per capita income rise by one percentage point every decade (it is now close to 5 percent). It has already achieved universal primary enrolment, and an equal...
10/11/07 -
Malaria, Sea Lice and Sunsets - I suppose there are worse places to call home. Stuff New Zealand quotes New Zealand's Prime Minister, Helen Clark, as offering to take migrants from the Pacific, should climate change lead them to flee their home islands. Ms. Clark says policies such as the New Zealand regional seasonal work scheme have built a solid base for assistance, which could be easily adapted to take Pacific refugees if sea...
10/11/07 -
NextBillion - The New York Times ran an interesting but rather incomplete article yesterday, discussing the split over anti-malaria bednet distribution strategies in Africa and the apparent demise of “social marketing” as a legitimate approach to reducing illness on a large scale. The article focuses on an ongoing debate in the aid community over whether or not insecticide-treated bednets, produced by Danish...
10/11/07 -
Vox - Why must the French job market undergo major reform? * The unemployment rate is too high and has been for too long to attribute it to bad macroeconomic policies. * Unemployment periods last too long – more than a year on average. When someone is out of work for that long, it often affects them for life. * Lastly, there’s an increasingly polarised job market – with the young...
10/11/07 -
fipher - Apparently with Kurdish Rebels recently attacking Turkish military, Turkey is seriously considering the invasion of Kurdistan in an effort to get rid of the PKK presence there. Now, honestly, I don't blame them for wanting to do so. The Kurds should not be attacking the Turkish government. Their reasoning is that they want a Kurdish homeland. First of all, I don't believe in any nation built upon...
10/11/07 -
Social Europe Blog - In the global economy, today’s winners can become tomorrow’s losers in a twinkling, and vice versa. Not so long ago, American pundits and economic analysts were snidely touting U.S. economic superiority to the “sick old man” of Europe. What a difference a few months can make. Today, with the stock market jittery over Iraq, the mortgage crisis, huge budget and trade deficits, and declining...
10/10/07 -
China Rises - Global companies are often criticized for sacrificing their principles and core values in coming to China. Look at how hard Google and Yahoo! were hit last year over internet censorship issues. China is too big a country for global marketers not to stake out a place for themselves. But do nonprofit entities also shift their values to have a presence in China? In conversations with colleagues...
10/10/07 -
Chinalawblog - China Warns Foreign Companies A manufacturing client of ours that is in the process of setting up shop in China sent me this article and asked me what I thought of it. You regular readers just need to read the article to know. The article comes from the AFP wire and is appropriately entitled "China warns foreign polluters." The thrust of the article is that China issued a warning to foreign...
10/10/07 -
Varnam - When Buddhist monks started their peaceful protest against economic mismanagement and political oppression in Burma, the U.N. Secretary General issued a statement asking all parties to avoid provocative actions, thus equating the peaceful monks with the ruthless dictators. As the Burmese protestors got support from around the world, the U.N. sent an envoy, Ibrahim Gambari, to meet with Senior Gen....
10/10/07 -
temasactuales - When discussing recovery/recycling among packaging materials in Brazil, glass sometimes suffers by comparison. Brazil is a world leader in recycling PET and aluminum cans, and high among recyclers of corrugated cardboard (77%). Brazil's 45% annual recycling rate for glass packaging is better than the glass packaging rate for the US (but then again, the US recycles ten times the volume), but is...
10/08/07 -
Freemania - There was nothing wrong with Gordon Brown going to Iraq to talk about troop withdrawals. But don’t take it from me; I have it on the highest authority, as interviewed on the Today programme yesterday morning: James Naughtie: Firstly, Gordon Brown’s visit to Iraq. Is that something you welcome, and would you expect something specific to be said and to come out of it? David Cameron:...
10/08/07 -
Registan - Via Dan Drezner I see the “legalize Afghan poppies” meme is gathering strength. After blasting past the relatively modest Senlis Council recommendation to license poppies for medicine, economist William Buiter summarizes: So legalise, regulate, tax, educate and rehabilitate. Stop a losing war, get the government off our backs, beat the Taliban and deal a blow to al-Qaeda in the process....
10/08/07 -
NuBricks - It’s official – the British love Canada. More and more of us are holidaying there and more and more of us are making the decision to build a new life in this stunning and diverse land. Faced with housing shortages, spiralling property prices and the chaos of modern UK living, the British are swapping island living for the second largest country in the world, pushing up land prices in tow and...
10/08/07 -
Countercurrents - Evoking memories of global activism against apartheid in South Africa, the Save Darfur movement is aiming to address the humanitarian crisis in the beleaguered region by campaigning for divestment from certain companies operating in Sudan. Though there are ample grounds for criticizing other stances taken (or not taken) by many in the Save Darfur movement – such as support for a no-fly zone,...
10/08/07 -
Lanka Rising - This is a world where marketing plays key role and it is very important to live knowing this reality, or one will be miserably under the grip of this marketing society. We should aware that these marketing people will try to sell caps even to someone who does not have a head. Marketing is no longer selling consumer commodities and services, rather selling of everything including individuals, and no...
10/08/07 -
Broowaha - A few weeks ago, volunteers of the Rio de Paz movement (”River of Peace”) made up a cemetery of Copacabana, Rio de Janeiro’s beach. The most famous beach in the world was indeed covered with 3,000 black bin bags filled with sand to protest against violence in the State of Rio de Janeiro, as 3,000 people died there in the first half of 2007. Antônio Carlos Costa, coordinator of Rio de Paz,...
10/06/07 -
North Korean Economy Watch - At 10 a.m. on June 28, I boarded a Koryo Air flight at Seoul’s Gimpo Airport, bound for Pyongyang. It took only one hour for the flight, organized by the non-governmental organization Movement for One Corea, to arrive at Pyongyang’s Sunan Airport, a two-story building bearing a large photo of the late North Korean leader Kim Il Sung ― not exactly an impressive sight for an airport. There...
10/06/07 -
Point Of No Return - A young law student at Cornell recently had an article published in the university newspaper entitled Arab Jews - an oxymoron? 'Many people in the West have never heard of Jews from Arab countries," Judd Robert Rothstein writes. "They do not know that Jewish roots in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and other 'Arab' countries stretch back thousands of years. " Indeed. It is as well to point out to the...
10/06/07 -
The Long War Journal - The Sunni insurgency continues to fracture as US and Iraqi forces are on the offensive in central and northern Iraq. Izzat Ibrahim al Douri, the most wanted Baathist and leader in the Sunni insurgency, has formed a new insurgent front that is willing to negotiate, while a faction of the 1920s Revolution Brigades openly denounced al Qaeda. A grouping of 22 Sunni insurgent groups have “convened...
10/04/07 -
goethe - The "Open Mosque Day" always takes place on 3 October, the Day of Germany Unity. According to the Central Council, this is intended to “express Muslims’ understanding of themselves as part of German unity and their solidarity with the entire population.” About 200,000 visitors were welcomed at the roughly 700 mosques that took part this year, Mounir Azzaoui from the Central Council told the...
10/04/07 -
fpwatch - The use of PMFs in Iraq has almost certainly been detrimental to long-term security and political goals. Blackwater’s foibles have only recently evolved from Michael Moore rant fodder to media sensation, but our use of PMFs in Iraq has always caused tensions with the Iraqi public and reflected badly on the Iraqi government’s sovereignty. For a scathing discussion of the issue of Private...
10/04/07 -
michael turton - One of the most important media tropes that governs presentations of Taiwan in the international media is that of Taiwan as an obstreperous child, in need of discipline. This Beijing-centric rhetorical convention thus implicitly presents China's annexation of the island as an act of discipline for a child unable to control itself, a wise and statesmanlike move by a responsible adult.... The latest...
10/03/07 -
Viss - Also, I also disagree with the convenient name given to the recent protests in Burma: “Saffron Revolution.” The name is too simplistic, inferring that these protests are religious in nature and that it is indeed a revolution. However, neither is true. Gambari still held hands with Than Shwe during their meeting in Naypyidaw. Thousands of monks are now arrested, in overflowing jails and makeshift...
10/03/07 -
Times Union - According to my acquaintances in Morocco, helping poor people is central to practicing Islam. This is especially emphasized during the month of Ramadan when Muslims fast from food and water from sunup to sundown every day for a month. One man told me, “When we fast, we feel what poor people feel. But for us, it’s different – we have food in front of us, but we refuse to take it. But the...
10/03/07 -
Break All Chains - We met two female members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) at the pre-established rendezvous point deep in the Colombian jungle. There we waited in a simple two-room wooden shack, which served as the home of a local peasant family. We sat there talking and drinking coffee while one of the guerrillas stood on the riverbank communicating through a hand-held radio. Finally, having...
10/03/07 -
Hidden Unities - If Peters is right that China cares more about its long-term presence in Burma than the tainting of its Olympics (a position I tend to agree with) by revelations of terrible slaughter and a worsening situation in Burma, then other avenues need to be explored with China by Western nations. This brings up a point from Robert Kaplan’s 2006 article about the Kim Family Regime and the post KFR North...
10/03/07 -
Cornell Blog - The transportation system here in notorious for its huge crowds and overwhelming disorder. The rush hour commute in the buses can take up to 2 hours to get from the East side to the West side of the city. On top of that, you may have to fight though the hordes of people trying to get on your bus. But have no fear, there are bus workers at each stop who push everyone onto the buses. I once saw a...
10/03/07 -
dc desi - A leading English Language newspaper reported that the Pakistani Government agreed to grant Amnesty to Benazir Bhutto. According to the report the government has agreed to quash corruption charges against Benazir Bhutto. What right does the Pakistani government have to grant amnesty to Benazir Bhutto? BB’s crimes affected the country and its people; her crime was against her people, people who...
10/01/07 -
defence of the realm - We are told by way of substance that the MoD "has produced a plan to decommission five warships from next April, which would reduce the Navy's capability to the level where it could carry out only 'one small-scale operation'". Furthermore, separate documentation from inside the department suggests that the total number of ships in the Navy and Royal Fleet Auxiliary could fall from the present...
10/01/07 -
Daniel Venezuela - One of the dramas of regimes that range between autocratic to totalitarian is that the big leaders have a hard time in getting good help. I mean, they can easily attract through power, money, or both, people capable of doing all the nasty things required for the beloved Supremo to remain in office. But that is all. Professional people, experienced people, people aware of their own value, have a hard...
10/01/07 -
the subversive garden - The Military dictatorship in Burma (Myanmar) is one of the most brutal in the world and committing outrageous human rights abuses. This present round of demonstrations began on August 18, when the government raised the price of diesel oil by 500% in order to cover a budget deficit that resulted from a salary hike for civil servants. The junta’s move of the Burmese capital to Pyinmana, now called...
09/30/07 -
A Fistfull of Euros - After Spain’s post-national elections, Poland is shaping up to be another case of post-national democracy in Europe: the Civic Platform leader Donald Tusk turned up in London this weekend to launch a campaign swing pitching for the votes of thousands of Polish expatriates. The polls suggest the Poles are quite narrowly divided; the contribution of the emigrants might be decisive. As an Polish...
09/30/07 -
Foreign Policy Watch - The Bush Doctrine's spectacular failure to bring anything but violence and chaos to the places it seeks to transform has brought the notion of democracy promotion into some disrepute. This isn't particularly surprising - past failures of international vision have often resulted in the American public recoiling from revisionist engagement in world affairs (the isolationism of the 1920s following...
09/30/07 -
DefenseTech.org - France is expected to soon rejoin NATO's military command after a 40-year absence. The French government withdrew from the NATO military structure in 1966 (although remaining a member of NATO's political-policy structure). France's new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has placed strong emphasis on France's relationship with the United States. And, he recently declared that he would soon undertake "very...
09/28/07 -
balk analysis - Several developments are concurrently taking place in and around the Middle East, both national and regional ones, which are likely to have wider implications. First, the United States is reluctantly starting to realize that the mission “Operation Iraqi Freedom” is failing, and that fairly soon the withdrawal of troops from Iraq will be no longer an option, but a necessity. Second, Turkey...
09/28/07 -
Van der Galiën - The issue is collective memory. History, after all, is not remembered in total. Rather, it is constructed out of selective fragments and interpretations. Sometimes these are selected out of self-interest, other times out of a perverse or even hateful self-flagellation. Responsible historians attempt to walk a fine line, acknowledging their own fallibility and biases while inevitably remaining...
09/28/07 -
political calculations - Europe marks the fourth stop in our continuing series comparing the relative economic performance of the nations of the world with their nearest neighbors! We've built a dynamic ranking table to show each of the nations' Gross Domestic Product (GDP) adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), 2006 population and their corresponding 2006 GDP-PPP per Capita. We've also determined each country's...
09/28/07 -
hadhramouts - As treacherous and dangerous as it is, large numbers of Somalis still flee to Yemen. Tens of thousands risk dehydration, asphyxiation, beatings or even being thrown overboard by unscrupulous and brutal traffickers who use rickety vessels - just to make the journey across the sea to Yemen. BIR ALI, Yemen -- The journey from Somalia ends and begins anew in Bir Ali. Along the Yemeni coast near this...
09/28/07 -
China Law Blog - China Hearsay has a great post entitled, "Product Liability and Exports: please make it stop." The post takes issue with an op-ed article by an American lawyer on what China must do in the legal arena to solve its product safety problems. I was troubled by what China Hearsay was relaying of this lawyer's article, but I got a downright sinking feeling when I followed the link to it and saw it was...
09/28/07 -
Eurozone Watch - Yesterday, Nicolas Sarkozy suggested an overhaul of the French social system to a press conference organised by the Association of journalists working on social issues (Ajis) in the Senate. His main proposals summarise as follows (read full speech): - Harmonise the special pension systems for certain public sector jobs. Some of them date back to the times of Louis XIV. While their integration...
09/26/07 -
bill fisher - Despite a US Congressional warning exempting American democracy-promotion funds from having to obtain prior approval from the Government of Egypt, the Mubarak regime - a major recipient of US aid and hailed by he Bush Administration as a staunch ally in the "global war on terror" -- has shut down one of the country's premiere human rights organizations. Earlier this month, Egypt dissolved the...
09/26/07 -
mother africa - The UN Secretary-General is finally turning his attention to the continent of Africa. This must be good news for the continent which has all along been consistently ignored and even directly manipulated by the rich countries of the world. It is not lost to Africans that only recently, the G8 held a meeting to discus on the global Climate Change. Experts say that global warming can adversely affect...
09/26/07 -
meander through the sand - With the world's largest population (at over 1.3 billion) as well as the world's fastest-growing economy, China is facing a pressing challenge in adequately supplying a most indispensable natural resource; water. China's push towards a market economy has contributed to the creation of a middle class and has improved the quality of life in many ways for millions. However, achieving the economic...
09/25/07 -
Beyond the River - It’s great to see foreign aid money going to fund something so needed, and it’s not hard to imagine that the trade these roads will facilitate has the potential to raise all boats in Tajikistan. But if you compare the American effort–a military bridge that can also handle, in some distant future, trucks going between two pretty minor economies–with China’s very visible and, to the average...
09/25/07 -
architecture week - his year, nine projects were recognized for architectural excellence in places where Muslims live. The triennial award program was established by His Highness the Aga Khan, Imam of the Shia Imami Ismaili Muslims, to enhance the understanding and appreciation of Islamic culture as expressed through architecture. The independent jury for the 2007 award program placed special value on meaningful...
09/25/07 -
History In The News - Under the Ottoman empire, the province of Syria comprised the entire Levant including the coastal area and Palestine. Since then, what some Syrians still see as "Greater Syria" has systematically shrunk. After the break-up of the Ottoman empire at the end of World War One, Syria was under a French mandate and France also made Lebanon separate. After World War Two, Lebanon and Syria each became...
09/25/07 -
bill fisher - Despite a US Congressional warning exempting American democracy-promotion funds from having to obtain prior approval from the Government of Egypt, the Mubarak regime - a major recipient of US aid and hailed by he Bush Administration as a staunch ally in the "global war on terror" -- has shut down one of the country's premiere human rights organizations. Earlier this month, Egypt dissolved the...
09/24/07 -
gather - Over the past two years, there has been a noticeable shift in European politics toward the center and right of the political spectrum. It began with conservative electoral victories in Germany and Poland in 2005, and was followed by similar electoral results in Sweden in 2006 and in Finland and France in 2007. This shift has led to a European political environment that is much more amenable to...
09/24/07 -
mideast youth - Because of totalitarian character of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), trade with it, apart from foods and medical goods, is immoral; it helps the regime to survive and to further tighten its noose round people’s necks. As an Iranian-born German, defending the interests of both nations, I have to mention, Germany in the past, with 12-year fascism, reminds me of today’s Iran; therefore German...
09/24/07 -
ahmedito - The first Muslims at today Russia's territory was Dagestani people (region of Derbent) after the Arab conquests (8th century). The first Muslim state was Volga Bulgaria (922. Tatars inherited the religion from that state. Later the most of European and Caucasian Turkic peoples also became followers of Islam. Islam in Russia has a long presence, extending at least as far back as the conquest of...
09/23/07 -
washington realist - Difficulties in getting the NATO Rapid Reaction Force off the ground point to the immense challenges facing the alliance. I would argue that most Europeans (and for that matter Americans) favor NATO because of the defined nature of its missions and requirements, and the vaguer and more global they become, the less likely they are to retain public support. And here one must not only address structural...
09/23/07 -
jerusalem gypsy - I had a lot of things to contemplate about this Yom Kippur morning. From silly thoughts that the word menopause is really "men oppose" to more serious thoughts as the day dragged on about how very few people in the Holy Land were eating today being that Ramadan and Yom Kippur fall on the same day today. It seemed really special to me that we were doing the same thing - suffering (and praying of...
09/23/07 -
Dani Rodrik - Non-economists are often baffled by the disagreements among professional economists on the issues of the day--from international trade to the minimum wage, from economic development to health policy. I think the best way to understand the source of these disagreements is to recognize that there are two genres of economists. I call them "first-best economists" and "second-best economists." Here...
09/21/07 -
pakistaniat - News reports in major newspapers do not usually use headlines with such obvious sarcasm. In fact, more than sarcasm there is desperation in the headline. It seems that like much of the nation, The News has also, finally, given up on the sham Presidential elections which are making a mockery of the Constitution, of the courts and, frankly, of the nation. The inverted commas in the headline say it...
09/21/07 -
EU Referendum - It has long been a truism in academic circles that at any conference to do with Balkans and Eastern Europe, all one had to do is say: “So, what do you think about Macedonia?” for the fur to start flying. People come to blows on the subject of what Macedonia is in the modern, mediaeval or ancient world; where it should be located; which country it is closest to; who its people are; and many other...
09/21/07 -
BONOBO LAND - This growth-driven stepping-up hiring picture - which is by no means unique to Bloomberg - unfortunately isn't quite the whole Italian labour market dynamics story, as the latest complete data set from ISTAT reveal. Let's have a look at why it isn't. First off, Italy's unemployment rate has been declining, there is no doubt about that. Here's the chart from Q1 2004 onwards. But how do we...
09/20/07 -
fpwatch - The government keeps pushing forward the role of women through various meetings and symposia. More usefully, it is pushing for the expanded employment of women and has opened nearly all professions to women. The government, if not supporting, is not blocking the move to permit female lawyers to represent their clients before Sharia Court judges. The government has also authorized women to obtain...
09/20/07 -
lion mountains - Congratulations on your election to the office of President of the Republic of Sierra Leone. I am exited and honored to write you this letter as you take over the reins of government of our beloved Republic and hope that you and members of your government would find time to read this open letter. Mr President these are challenging times. Your presidency is facing the greatest challenge ever in...
09/20/07 -
nomad journal trips - Siberia is an absolutely huge landmass in the east of Russia. It comprises roughly 75 percent of Russia and contains the largest fresh water lake in the world, Lake Baikal. Starting in the Ural Mountains, Siberia stretches across the Asian plain to the Pacific Ocean. Depending upon how you calculate it, there are seven different time zones in Siberia, while there are only three in United States. To...
09/20/07 -
DefenseTech - Major progress is being made in increasing the "transparency" of China's armed forces - known collectively as the Peoples Liberation Army (PLA). "Transparency" is a Washington term as senior U.S. military officers, defense officials, and analysts seek to know more about the strength and intentions of China's defense establishment. The outgoing chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Marine...
09/20/07 -
Daniel Drezner - Imagine for a second that the United States opposed the leading candidate for a leading international organization. Now imagine that in an effort to block that candidate, the U.S. decides to put its own candidate forward. To ensure that the candidate doesn't look like a complete toady, it would make some sense to propose a non-American. However, it would also make sense, at the very least, to make...
09/20/07 -
The Reaction - In the first episode of the great Yes, Prime Minister, "The Grand Design," new PM Jim Hacker meets with the government's chief scientific advisor to discuss defence policy. The advisor, a hawkish Austrian, argues that the Soviet Union would use "salami tactics" to take over Europe, that is, a "slice-by-slice" plan with no one slice so grave as to compel the West (or the U.K., in this case) to respond...
09/19/07 -
The Truth Shall Set You Free - As I have discussed before, Buddhism in the modern world is supposedly making a comeback as a socially-engaged, activist religion, now being concerned with environmental causes, animal welfare, pacifist movements, and social justice. But there is one huge contradiction at the heart of the logic of Buddhist activism. According to the basic planks of Buddhism found in the Four Noble Truths, suffering...
09/18/07 -
Wide Eyes, Wider World - Turpan (which is "Tulufan" in Mandarin) is an oasis town in the middle of the Gobi Desert, about three hours by car from Urumqi. The day we drove there was cloudy and very windy-- we got out in the middle of the desert just to look at the vast flat nothing (not quite what I was picturing in my first real desert experience, but that came later) and feel the incredible wind blasting across the nothing...
09/18/07 -
Living in a Fishy World - Hello friends, So I have been back in Canada for many months and many of you (the 5 family and 3 friends) that read this site have given up checking for updates. But I will continue to Blog for my own sanity and my own purposes. The issue of poverty in some/ most countries within Africa is something I hold close to my heart. It’s a complex puzzle and Chirs Tenove did a good job of explaining...
09/17/07 -
p2pnet - Bloggers have, “fought wars over the cultural divide between Vietnam’s north and south, but they have also raised funds for the needy, arranged organ donations and given support to people suffering deadly diseases,” says the story, citing Cuoi HK, aka Tuyen, a Vietnam Airlines employee who, “touched thousands as he chronicled his fight against cancer on a blog, and supporters held real-life...
09/17/07 -
Song of the Open Road - I was told about the King and how he took control of the military in the 7o’s, about the politics behind marijuana production- “If they told people that they could not grow marijuana they would not be able to live”-, about the migrations and divisions of Berber tribes- “Nobody knows the origin of the Berber people, but the Berber language is very similar to German. Maybe the Berbers migrated...
09/17/07 -
Brussels Journal - Vladimir Bukovksy, the 63-year old former Soviet dissident, fears that the European Union is on its way to becoming another Soviet Union. In a speech he delivered in Brussels last week Mr Bukovsky called the EU a “monster” that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a fullfledged totalitarian state. Mr Bukovsky paid a visit to the European Parliament on Thursday at...
09/16/07 -
Publius Pundit - The more you think you know about Lebanon the less you do. If from outside one tends to see the situation in black and white, from inside there are definitely several grey nuances. Generally speaking the problems are related to: 1) the old guard -- people who have been in power since the 70s and 80s. They have developed a certain working framework, which was not altered by Rafiq Hariri's...
09/16/07 -
In From the Cold - The possible transfer of "nuclear material" from North Korea to other rogue states is something we've written about at length, including this most recent installment. Fact is, we don't know the full extent of the "relationship" between Pyongyang, Tehran and Damascus. Clearly, North Korea has been the primary source of ballistic missile technology for both Iran and Syria; both countries have active...
09/16/07 -
jamiyat - Everyone in Uzbekistan knows how to deal with the prices at the market. Not a secret that when one sees a price label on any product at a market in Uzbekistan, one has to negotiate to be able to buy that product for a lower price. It is a widely accepted rule. But Uzbekistan have been going through a transition period with its own model of development 16 years now, and things are changing in this...
09/14/07 -
centre for european reform - On September 17th the European Union’s Court of First Appeal will rule on Microsoft’s long-awaited appeal against the record fine imposed on the company by the Commission in 2004 for abusing its dominant position in computer operating systems. The decision to fine Microsoft has prompted unprecedented criticism of EU competition policy and even accusations of anti-US bias. If the court upholds...
09/14/07 -
Jan’s EUblog - When I read this article in Frankfurter Allgemeine on Saturday, I could not really believe it: A university teacher from my former study centre for Social Sciences at the Humboldt University in Berlin has been arrested as a terror suspect. The accusations really sounded too unreal to be true. But the FAZ is a serious newspaper and maybe the article was just a fictional scenario to point at the...
09/14/07 -
scott bohlinger - Right now I'm wrapping up my big report for IWA and getting ready to go back to Kabul, and on to the next job. The concept for the report is 'perceptions of NGO integrity in Afghanistan'. It's actually two reports, based on two questionnaires (one for the population as a whole and one for NGO professionals and political elites) with participants in twenty provinces. What we've found is this: There...
09/13/07 -
Harry's Place - Last week while Americans slept blissfully, newspapers from India, the Persian Gulf, Israel and the United Kingdom all carried the same story. The Greenland ice cap appears to be in early stages of collapse. Journalists, who followed religious leaders on a pilgrimage to Greenland, had been given a scoop by a group of scientists who are doing research on Greenland’s two-mile high ice cap. The...
09/13/07 -
beatroot - At Luxemburg Place, near the EU Parliament, there was also the ritualistic pushing and shoving with the cops, who were expecting up to 20,000, not the pathetic amount the organizers could round up (see here and here). In fact, cops and media outnumbered protesters. The slogans on the banners included: No Sharia here! …etc. The demonstration was organized, among others, by Stephen Gash of...
09/13/07 -
enterprise resilience blog - I concluded that the triangle of Foreign Direct Investment, Official Development Aid, and remittances provides a pool of resources that can be used to help emerging economies develop. It is not, however, a formula for long-term success. Most things in life require balance and this is certainly true when it comes to development. The goal of development is establish a growing and sustainable economy...
09/13/07 -
nz herald - Outside my bedroom window in Tblisi, Georgia, a gilded St George is slaying his dragon in the morning sunlight. St George is the patron saint of this Caucasian country and since the collapse of the USSR has been enjoying something of a revival. He's not the only facet of Georgian life to be doing so. The distinctive cruciform Georgian churches with their circular towers are once again alive...
09/13/07 -
frog in a well - The Nationalist period in China was not good for Buddhists. They were portrayed as an example of the feudal backwardness that held China back. Given how well this fit with earlier Confucian critiques of Buddhists as parasites and Western missionaries’ dismissal of the religion as primitive hokum there was not much room for Buddhism in many nationalist’s visions of a new China. Buddhism vanished...
09/13/07 -
Captain's Quarters - Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe unexpectedly resigned today, apparently tired of political battles over diplomacy and economics. The move stunned the political establishment in Tokyo, which had prepared for an Abe defense of a counter-terrorism policy that had encountered some resistance: Embattled Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Wednesday he would resign in hope of making it...
09/11/07 -
Pajamas Media - During the last elections in Germany and France, conservative and pro-American parties and candidates have achieved remarkable results; although many assume that anti-Americanism is on the rise in Europe, these US-friendly parties and candidates have won the elections in their countries. In the Netherlands, Geert Wilders performed well too, and recent polls indicate that if elections were held...
09/11/07 -
South Africa News - Cape Town has immersed itself thoroughly in the international coffee culture trend. And as with everything else in this vibrant city, the Cape coffee culture has its very own distinct flavour. Cape Town is one of a handful of South African cities where the CBD is thriving – with more and more people working, living and playing right in the heart of the inner city. Demand for Cape Town accommodation...
09/11/07 -
Itching for Eestimaa - Reading the English-language news on Estonia is often reading the Russian news on Estonia, or reading the Estonian news' response to the Russian news on Estonia. Like the neverending Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Estonian-Russian relations are like a Rubik's Cube that can never be 'solved.' But why waste so much energy on that relationship with diminishing returns? Toomas Hendrik Ilves speech at...
09/11/07 -
Japan Economy Watch - While financial markets are gazing firmly towards the US economy shadowing Ben Bernanke's every word and gesture for a hint of future rate decisions economic fundamentals in Japan are trending firmly and steadily downwards into worrisome territory. At this point however the headline chosen for this entry might still seem rather alarmist but given the nature of lag of economic data relative to the...
09/11/07 -
Vox EU - It is fairly widely accepted that in the aggregate trade generates gains and promotes economic growth but it can also create winners and losers. In America’s case, trade with developing countries is viewed as particularly problematic because it could put downward pressures on the earnings of lower-wage workers. And indeed, it is precisely this type of trade that has expanded especially rapidly...
09/11/07 -
FP Watch - The news that Israel conducted a flyover of Syrian territory has caused something of a diplomatic incident between the two countries. Syria has expressed strong outrage that its sovereignty was violated, and proudly claims that it effectively retaliated by hitting one of the invading planes with anti-aircraft weaponry. Israel, meanwhile, has not been forthcoming with an explanation, so rumors are...
09/10/07 -
North Korea Zone - Few of us are lucky enough to be able to spend a week in North Korea, so how does 10 months sound like? It that's your cup of cha, the British Council is looking for three English language teacher trainers as part of its “high-profile project [that] has been running since 2000.” The drawbacks? You have to be British and you almost certainly won't be able to take your partner. I'm surprised...
09/10/07 -
Next Billion - "The sun has set in one of the world's poorest nations and as the floodlights come on at G'bessi International Airport, the parking lot begins filling with children." I read this in the news article "Kids in Guinea Study Under Airport Lamps" earlier this summer. I thought to myself that the lack of light in Guinea makes these students go to the airport to be able to study for their finals, and that...
09/10/07 -
From Uruguay - Right after the economic crisis of 2002 a Brazilian Pentecostal church, called Iglesia Universal del Reino de Dios, spread all over the country, like a virus. They launched a very aggressive mediatic campaign including one hour spots in Uruguay air channels on a daily basis. Their slogan is Pare de Sufrir (stop suffering). They are highly criticized for their methods, even among other Christian...
09/08/07 -
Long War Journal - Multinational Forces Iraq and Iraqi Security Forces have launched a major offensive operation in Iraq’s northern provinces on September 5. Called Operation Lightning Hammer II, the offensive is aimed at al Qaeda’s network in Salahadin, Ninewa, Diyala, and Kirkuk provinces. Operation Lightning Hammer II is a corps-sized operation, consisting of over 14,000 Iraqi Security Forces and 12,000 US...
09/08/07 -
La Contra Revolution - And so … Cuba’s blogger in chief, Fidel Castro Ruz, EPD, (por si las moscas), now warns us , perhaps even from the great beyond, that the world might be heading for another global recession like the great depression of the 30’s. Is it because he’s going to kick the bucket and leaving the masses of the world without their greatest protector and benefactor? No, it’s because: ...
09/08/07 -
Carpe Diem - Walt G writes: "How can U.S. companies compete against foreign companies that do not have to abide by the same laws and regulations? Even I could run a profitable company in the U.S. with 25 cents-per-hour prison labor, by dumping dangerous chemicals on the ground, spewing poisonous vapors into the air, and ignoring all rules, regulations, and standards. We could easily have a capitalist Chinese...
09/06/07 -
joshua landis - What is this about? One has to believe it is an intentional provocation. Way up north along the Euphrates River near Turkey. The plans headed from the Mediterranean along the border with Turkey and dipped into Syrian airspace, one is led to believe. Were they on the way to the Iraqi boarder region? The reports try to link it to Syrian support for Hamas, but it makes no sense for Israeli plans to...
09/06/07 -
the democratic strategist - Anyone paying much attention to comparative politics has probably noticed that organized bloggers and their readership--i.e., the core of the "netroots"--has played a much more prominent role in U.S. politics, especially on the left side of the spectrum, than in other highly "wired" countries. There are numerous possible explanations for this example of "American exceptionalism," including the...
09/06/07 -
nubian cheetah - In every civilization there has always been two kinds of markets with some small variations of the markets. The formal market is comprised of educated and professional workers who usually work in cities, whereas the informal market are considered not to have a formal education, but are skilled workers who live and work in the rural areas, and they grow, make and produce societies goods. The informal...
09/06/07 -
Global Voices - For many months now, tension has been inexorably rising, as a dissident general named Laurent Nkunda has refused to integrate his forces into the national army and prepared for war instead. He has positioned himself as the protector of a Tutsi minority threatened by the continued presence of a large group of Rwandan Hutu rebels (the FDLR/Interahamwe, many of whom were implicated in the 1994 genocide...
09/06/07 -
Reform Syria - While many Arabs view Israel as a sore implant, I view it as a blessing. I should provide an example of what I mean. In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech tragedy, we learned that friends of ours lost a daughter. Some ten days later, we visited them at their house with some other friends. Conversation surrounding the tragedy ensued and one of my dearest friends whom I have a lot of respect for...
09/06/07 -
SMJ - The recent U.S. consideration to designate the 125,000 person strong Revolutionary Guard of Iran as a “specially designated global terrorist” (per Executive Order 13224) has quite a few international security implications. (1) On the most basic level, it highlights growing U.S. and Iranian tensions over Iran’s nuclear weapons program and Iranian involvement—via its Quds Force belonging to...
09/05/07 -
La Gringas Blogicito - Hurricane Felix slammed into Nicaragua as a Category 5 hurricane early this morning but has been losing steam after making landfall and hitting the mountains of Nicaragua and Honduras. Felix has now been downgraded to a tropical storm. Not that tropical storm force winds (39-73 mph/63-119 kph) are anything to sneeze at, but it was greeted as great news by the local television stations. Now...
09/05/07 -
Give Well - There’s been a lot of excitement about microlending, especially since the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize created a wave of stories about it. The basic idea is to make loans to the destitute, helping them pull themselves out of poverty. The stories and the numbers floating around from fundraisers paint a picture that’s simply too good to be true (below) … we can’t authoritatively say that we have...
09/05/07 -
Horses Ass - With much of our foreign policy focus on the Middle East these days, we haven’t been looking that much at what’s been happening closer to home: Alarmed by rising threats to Mexican law and order from ever-more-brazen drug lords, the Bush administration is quietly negotiating a counternarcotics aid package with the Mexican government that would increase US involvement in a drug war south...
09/04/07 -
EUReferendum - The Yorkshire Post is running an exclusive this morning, telling us that "British passports face yet another European makeover" after the government agreed with proposals from Brussels to stamp them with passages from the EU treaty. Says the newspaper, "Under contentious plans for a huge expansion of the EU's involvement in representing member states and their people abroad, it has emerged the...
09/04/07 -
Whirled View - I’ve been torn between writing about the fires that have ravaged parts of Greece this past summer and the recent election of Abdullah Gul as Turkey’s first religiously conservative, economically liberal president. It’s not that the two are linked, it’s simply because I’ve been following both thanks to Internet access to sources and commentary not available just a few years ago. The...
09/04/07 -
Reflections of a Young Fogey - The death earlier this week of Mohammed Zahir Shah, the last King of Afghanistan, served to remind many of the era of relative stability that marked much of his reign. Born into the Barakzai dynasty in Kabul in 1914, Zahir Shah ascended the throne in 1933 at the age of nineteen. During his forty year reign he embarked upon a programme of modernisation which resulted in the establishment of a modern...
08/31/07 -
FP Watch - What is it about the phony League of Democracies that continues to attract attention? John McCain famously put the proposed organization on the map earlier this spring with a speech to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "We should go further and start bringing democratic peoples and nations from around the world into one common organization, a worldwide League of Democracies," said...
08/31/07 -
Gorilla’s Guides - n Syria yesterday (Thursday), UNHCR and the World Food Programme started a text SMS campaign by mobile phone to alert more than 33,000 vulnerable Iraqi refugees in Damascus of the launch of the first food distribution programme for them on Saturday. The first food ration will cover two months in anticipation of the needs of many refugee families during the upcoming fasting month of Ramadan. We...
08/31/07 -
Uskowi on Iran - Internal issues in Iran have shifted government and public attention away from foreign policy and nuclear issues to divisive internal power politics and such issues as the deteriorating economy, the housing crisis, gas rationing, press crackdown, health insurance disorganization, stock exchange predicament and the like. This summer is indeed proving to be a hot one for Iran; not for the often-talked-about...
08/31/07 -
North Korea Zone - The massive flooding in North Korea is expected to have a strong negative effect on North Korea's grain crop this autumn. In a commentary for the Institute of Peace & Cooperation, Kwon Taejin of the Korean Rural Agricultural Institute estimates that anywhere from 150,000 to 200,000 tons of rice and corn will be lost either directly or indirectly due to the flooding. Good Friends reports that residents...
08/31/07 -
democracyarsenal - There is no way to tell until we see the text of the agreement, but I think most likely this is posturing on the part of Maliki. Back in early July the cabinet (Or should I say half cabinet , since all of the Sunnis as well as the Sadrists were already boycotting) approved an oil law which the Kurds and Sunnis both objected to. You had two to three days of news stories about it, but it became...
08/31/07 -
Intellibriefs - Nigeria loses $14 billion a year to oil theft, according to Stephen Hayes, the president of the Corporate Council on Africa. The supposed monetary losses incurred by the oil-rich West African country were calculated based on the estimated number of barrels of lost production due to corruption and crime, said Hayes. "If you are losing 600,000 barrels a day on oil at $70 a barrel, you are losing...
08/30/07 -
The Gringologue - n September 9, Guatemala elects a new President and Congress. While Guatemala’s 12 million people might be just a drop in the States’ 300+ million pond, elections in Guatemala can reverberate politically through Central and even South America. And while it’s doubtful that the world press will pay much attention to the election here (mainly because the chances for the country’s only world-renowned...
08/30/07 -
RBC - All this much is straightforward. But the underlying issue seems murkier: why, in fact, do the Turks care about this issue so much? You might think that the answer is obvious: the Turks care because no one likes to be accused of genocide. But the regime that committed it is not that of the current Turkish Republic: it was the Ottoman Empire, which was overthrown by Kemal Ataturk because of, among...
08/30/07 -
Indian Ecnomy - Earlier this year the Doha round of WTO trade negotiations collapsed (again) after the US, Europe, India, and Brazil were unable to reach a reciprocating agreement on cutting farm subsidies in the west, and lowering industrial goods and service barriers in the developing world. India and Brazil blamed the US and Europe for not lowering their collossally high agricultural subsidies enough. But...
08/29/07 -
RCConversations - As I was digging myself out of the vacation e-mail backlog, I found a pile of alarmed messages. They contained various versions of this story on the Chinese self-discipline pledge that a number of blog hosting services including MSN and Yahoo! signed last week. Before doing anything I checked in with some Chinese bloggers. I found people doing the literary equivalent of thumbing their noses with...
08/29/07 -
FPWatch - It's a mistake to think that a thriving democracy is right around the corner for Pakistan. The announcement recently that the former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, would be allowed back into the country (after many years of forced exile) was a step in the right direction, but a far, far cry from anything resembling a democratic realignment. For starters, the Pakistani military stands right in the...
08/29/07 -
Middle East Journal - “Al Qaeda terrifies locals,” said Major Mike Garcia from Canyon, Texas, before he put me in a convoy of Humvees with 18 American Military Police on their way to the small town of Mushadah just north of Baghdad. “The only people Iraqis may be more afraid of is their mothers. When we arrest or detain people and threaten to call up their mom, they completely freak out. Please, no, don’t tell...
08/28/07 -
Fifty Viss - Mizzima News has a very interesting article on an alternative explanation for the sudden price increases of fuel last Tuesday. To put it shortly, the article claims that an anonymous group named “Counter Strike Group” said that the recent price hikes of Burma’s diesel, gasoline and natural gas are to invoke civil unrest in Burma. It claims that this maneuver was deliberately done by the Burmese...
08/28/07 -
Fist Full of Euros - Under German law, religious education is mandatory in state schools. (Sort of, anyway; these days one can opt to learn about “ethics” instead, and some of the godless Eastern states are more lenient than that.) There are two separate RE classes, one for each of the two main denominations in Germany: the Roman Catholic Church and the EKD, or German Evangelical Church. (”Evangelical” does not...
08/28/07 -
China Law Blog - One of the things I am always saying is that most of what is going on in China today is not distinctively or inherently "Chinese." It very much reminds me of what went on in Russia after the fall of communism there and in Korea in the 1980s and (from what I hear, Japan in the 1950s). I have frequently refer to the television show Deadwood (see here and here)in discussing today's China and now, the...
08/27/07 -
World Politics Review - Caribou Coffee, the second-largest U.S. java seller, seems at first blush like a fairly ordinary American company. The chain was founded in 1992 in the small town of Edina, Minn., the brainchild of idealistic newlyweds, and has since expanded to over 400 coffeehouses in 18 states. Caribou's menu is muffins and lattes -- not an Arabic coffee in sight. It may come as a surprise, then, to know that...
08/27/07 -
Peter Foster - Every now and again, something unexpected will occur that suddenly brings home to you the extent to which you have unconsciously absorbed the ways and standards of your adopted home. A small and common example of this phenomenon might be seeing a female European or American tourist wandering through India in hot-pants and strappy top and feeling uncomfortable at the inappropriateness of her...
08/27/07 -
Opinio Juris - The State Secrets Privilege. I know little about this doctrine and defer to Bobby’s superior expertise. I will just make a simple point that will by now be familiar. The state secrets privilege, like the other rules we have discussed, reflects a tradeoff between liberty (or some other value at stake in a particular case) and security. The privilege allows the executive to maintain secrecy where...
08/24/07 -
Peru Food - I'm sorry but I can't blog about Peruvian food this week; my most recent thoughts about Peru still have to do with last week's devastating earthquake. Bear with me. Prior to the earthquake, the city of Pisco (about two hours south of Lima) was a historic small town, famous for its colonial architecture, its rich fishing and trading history, and the fact it gives its name to the most traditional...
08/24/07 -
Blog South Africa - It seems as though the Democratic Alliance is going to be taking eThekwini Municipality to court, to set aside the recent controversial renaming of streets in Durban. For those who don’t know, the ANC led council have decided to rename a number of old landmark streets, such as Grey street and Victoria Embankment to names of ‘heroes of the struggle’. These heroes include the Amanzimtoti...
08/24/07 -
History In The News - The border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, never effectively ruled by the Moghuls of India, by the British, by Isamabad or by Kabul, has become a safe haven for the Taliban. Both Afghanistan and Pakistan have accused the other of harboring the insurgents. At the present Loya Jiriga, a milestone for the otherwise unfriendly nations, there are declarations of mutual cooperation- but little...
08/24/07 -
My Thoughts - As the whole world waits patiently for Sierra Leone's National Electoral Commission to complete it's tally of the first round of votes and with about 98% of the results out so far, it seems inevitable that that a run-off between the two leading candidates; Ernest Bai Koroma of the A.P.C. party and Solomon Berewa of the S.L.P.P. is now in the works. All indications from the three top political parties...
08/24/07 -
AmerPundit - Well, we just keep getting closer, don’t we? An investigating officer recommended Thursday dismissing all charges against a Marine accused of murdering two girls in an assault that killed 24 civilians in the Iraqi town of Haditha. Investigating officer Lt. Col. Paul Ware said the evidence was too weak for a court-martial. Tatum shot and killed civilians, but “he did so because of...
08/24/07 -
Executive Outcomes - Georgia has accused Russia of violating its airspace again. According to Georgia, its radar recently tracked a Russian aircraft penetrating Georgian airspace near Abkhazia -- a pro-Russian breakaway region and an area of substantial Georgian-Russian tension. The first incursion allegedly took place Aug. 6 and involved a missile fired at a Georgian village. Whether intentional or not, the missile...
08/22/07 -
Armed Forces International - In breaking news, Armed Forces International has learnt that a US Military helicopter crashed in Iraq last night, consequently killing all those on board. The helicopter involved was a UH-60 Black Hawk, and had on board four crew members and ten soldiers. According to a statement issued this morning, the crash was the result of mechanical failure, and not connected to any kind of hostile fire or...
08/22/07 -
China Rising - Whether it’s shoes or clothing or camping gear, all of it from China, it strikes me that the sale prices don’t always reflect the real costs. That sense has grown deeper since we’ve been in China, even if not well-articulated in my own mind. I’d pick up a pair of well-made thick leather shoes, and think, “These have to be worth more than $20.” I’d buy them anyway, and feel a little...
08/22/07 -
Intellibriefs - Over the weekend, the Chinese government sealed a series of energy deals with the governments of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Airy promises of cooperation on the windswept Asian steppe are about as common as cold winters, but these deals are different. China's offers are monumental in scope, strategic in nature and backed up by cold, hard cash. The two most critical projects involve the final...
08/22/07 -
World Politics Review - The Arab world is watching in disbelief -- and growing concern -- the recent spate of undiplomatic mudslinging between Syria and Saudi Arabia. Damascus and Riyadh have had tense relations for some time now, but the latest outburst, initiated by Damascus, left many looking towards Iran as the most plausible explanation for the renewed acrimony between these two Arab countries. It all began when...
08/22/07 -
Just World News - Recent Bush Administration plans to sell $20 billion in arms to the Gulf Arab states (while giving $30 billion plus to the Israelis) are being defended primarily within the logic of "balance of power." Out the window is Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's "transformational diplomacy" or peace through democracy promotion. We're back to the old policy of peace through power. One might build an...
08/22/07 -
My Heart's In Accra - What does maize cost in Ghana today? That’s a useful question to ask if you’re a farmer in Burkina Faso, wondering if it’s worth selling your harvest locally, or whether you might invest in a lorry to take your grain south, where it might fetch a higher price. The TradeNet system built at the BusyLabs technology incubator in Accra makes it possible to find up-to-date prices on agricultural...
08/20/07 -
Real Russia Project - Last week the leaders of Russia, China and several former Soviet republics met in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. Their goal was to promote more international investment and cooperation in the fight against terrorism in Central Asia. This year's summit caused a stir in the Western media because it coincided with wargames conducted by 6,000 troops from the Shanghai Cooperation Organization...
08/20/07 -
Viss - On the eve of the 19th anniversary of the events of August 8, 1988, I would like to pay my respects to the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Burmese who rallied for change in a country so deprived of basic rights and shut from the rest of the world and especially to the thousands of civilians who were killed by gunfire during these protests. 1988 marks a defining point in Burma’s history, as the...
08/20/07 -
Brussels Journal - The politicians in Brussels, the capital of Belgium, are unable to form a government coalition with sufficient support in both parts of the multinational country, i.e. in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking north of the country, and Wallonia, the French-speaking south. They have asked the Belgian King Albert II to defuse the situation. The Walloon politicians refuse to join a government led by Yves...
08/17/07 -
World Politics Review - While seven political parties are campaigning to win seats in Kazakhstan's lower house of parliament, common Kazakhs remain largely indifferent to the election, believing the results aren't likely to bring change from a government whose commitment to democracy is lately in doubt. ...
08/17/07 -
Unheard Voices - For the past few weeks, London has been in the middle of the “India Now” festival and the BBC TV channel has been showing programmes about India and Pakistan, to celebrate the 60th year of our independence. There are special features about Indian food, Pakistani politics, and even Shahrukh Khan had his new movie premiere in London as part of this mela of all things Indian and Pakistani — the...
08/17/07 -
- Weapons can harm and scare, and lack of them can worsen any country’s bargaining position. So is true for Georgia - country that has been beating the world record in the highest average military growth rate over the last two years. This year, the military spending will almost double, reaching some 1 billion Georgian Laris (~$575 million). This number accounts for over 6% of Georgia’s GDP and...
08/17/07 -
Registan - Though technically outside the area we cover at Registan.net, I’ve been writing a ton about Iran. There is a reason for this: taking a step back to look at what’s happened recently reveals some surprising hints about their intentions. I think Iran is trying to position itself as the next big player in Central Asia, with potentially deadly consequences should the U.S. misinterpret what’s going...
08/17/07 -
Eunomia - Hanson allows the idea that policies in the Near East might be cited as reasons for the appalling collapse in our reputation in these countries only to dismiss this as the claim of “apologists.” Yet the massive discontent of the Turkish public with the United States can be traced directly to the invasion of Iraq, and to a lesser extent the American acquiescence in the bombing of Lebanon. The...
08/17/07 -
VIKRAM SOOD - The Cold War era produced its more or less stable tensions of mutually assured destruction as the two superpowers stared across lethal nuclear fences. The transfer of these tensions to the ‘Third World’ where the main antagonists battled each other either through their surrogates or proxies, helped. Besides, these wars helped in other ways. They enabled the testing of new weapons and the transfer...
08/15/07 -
Moldova - The share of monetary transactions sent by Moldavian migrant workers back to their families, accounts for 27% of the country?s GDP. In this way, Moimageldova is ranked second in the world after Togo, in the list of countries with economies that depend on money sent from abroad. According to the newly published report ?Moldova ? migration problems?, the share of money send from abroad increased from...
08/15/07 -
3 Quarks Daily - In the South Asian subcontinent, August 14th and 15th commemorate events that are joyous, traumatic and shameful all at once. With the displacement of millions and the deaths of hundreds of thousands accompanying independence (and the birth of Salim Sinai), the chaotic birth of the new states on the subcontinent, while not unique in kind, was unprecedented in scale. The very first foreseeable and...
08/15/07 -
Demography Matters - The International Labour Organisation has a new report out today, entitled "Visions for Asia’s Decent Work Decade: Sustainable Growth and Jobs to 2015". You can download the report in pdf here). The report uses comparatively strong langauge, warning that - due to comparatively rapid `population ageing - the “demographic dividend” process is likely be limited in many parts of Asia, with the...
08/13/07 -
Abu Aardvark - The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is reportedly about to release the long-awaited platform for its political party. Drafts have been leaking to various newspapers for a while, along with stories about internal disagreements and debates, but al-Masry al-Youm seems to think that it has acquired a copy of the final version and has published it in two parts. The contents of the platform won't suprise...
08/13/07 -
Notes from YKPAIHA - The liquidators are certainly entitled to such benefits. In fact, they are essentially war veterans because, whether they had a choice about it or not, they willingly faced an insidious force to protect their country. Just like war veterans, they sacrificed their own well being for the well being of their countrymen. Nevertheless, I see two factors that complicate the situation regarding their social...
08/13/07 -
Vital Perspective - Just as "moderate Germans" did nothing to stop the Nazis, we should not expect "moderate Muslims" to risk disruption of their lives and exclusion from their communities to stand up and oppose Islamists with vehemence. History has taught us well and repeatedly that "moderates" simply want to go on with their lives, not make a fuss, just ride with the tide. The heros of history are not the moderates....
08/12/07 -
Russia Blog - Russian scientists, joined by the veteran Australian polar explorer Michael McDowell and Frederik Paulsen, a Swedish pharmaceuticals millionaire and co-sponsor of the effort, indeed had a safe and successful trip to the Pole and to the sea bed nearly two miles beneath it. The expedition amused the entire world, and only days after the historic dive, countries and legal specialists started wondering...
08/12/07 -
David McWilliams - he Irish plantation of the English countryside is in full swing. It is hard to know what Elizabeth the first – the instigator of the plantation of Ireland – would make of it. Today, Irish Catholic farmers – descendants of those dispossessed in the Tudor conquest of Ireland – are the largest foreign buyers of English farmland. According to Frank Knight, the British estate agents, 7.3pc of...
08/12/07 -
Pharmalot - That’s the indication after interviews were conducted with 185 execs from different drugmakers, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. More of just about every activity will shift over there, but particularly a larger portion of research and development, and manufacturing. The survey participants, by the way, included execs from big pharma as well as local players with operations in China, India,...
08/10/07 -
Information Awareness - Ironically, while Sadr is often painted as an Iranian pawn by the Bush administration and its supporters, it is SIIC that has the closest ties to Iran of any of Iraq's political factions (with Prime Minister Maliki's Dawa Party a close second). SIIC's Badr Corp militia - the one featured in the above article - was formed, trained and armed by Iran in Iran itself during the preceding decades. That...
08/10/07 -
Israel Matzav - A peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians will not be reached for at least three to five years; Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak as saying. Yedioth Ahronoth said on Friday that in private conversations, Barak said the idea of reaching a peace deal with the Palestinians anytime soon was a "fantasy". He also said that Israel would not withdraw...
08/10/07 -
Voxeu - However, if at the aggregate level Chinese and Indian growth is good news for the region, some industries and firms in some countries appear to be negatively affected. This seems to be the case, for example, with industrial and electrical machinery, electronics, furniture, textiles and transport equipment, mainly in Mexico and to some extent in Central American countries. However, the study found...
08/09/07 -
Pharmalot - The drugmaker says the $2 billion lawsuit should be dismissed because its researchers didn’t do any harm and, in fact, saved lives when they gave children an experimental drug during a 1996 meningitis epidemic, The Washington Post reports. In a 26-page brief filed in the northern Nigerian state of Kano, Pfizer described the clinical drug trial of its Trovan antibiotic as Trovan as legal and...
08/09/07 -
WPR Blog - In the words of former U.N. Assistant Secretary General Gillian Sorensen, the United States must regard the United Nations as a "valuable instrument" and push to work with the organization in order to guarantee its success in the future. Sorensen, now a senior advisor of the United Nations Foundation, stressed to academics and analysts gathered at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced...
08/09/07 -
From Uruguay - Everybody's been talking about Chavez's visit to Uruguay over the last couple of days, so I figured it would be worth it taking a moment and writing some thoughts on the matter. Chavez is doing a tour across south american countries to nail his acceptance in the Mercosur block, yet to be definitively approved. As a part of this tour it has visited Uruguay. Visit which took place yesterday and today....
08/08/07 -
The Brussels Journal - Ten thousand Chinese become Christians each day, according to a stunning report by the National Catholic Reporter's veteran correspondent John Allen, and 200 million Chinese may comprise the world's largest concentration of Christians by mid-century. China may be for the 21st century what Europe was during the 8th-11th centuries, and America has been during the past 200 years: the natural ground...
08/08/07 -
Progressive Gold - When it comes to the arms trade the British government are the deranged offspring of a Ferengi and Franz Kafka, insatiable greed and bureacratic ineptitude combined in one nightmare package. Here’s a nice encapsulation of the sick situation by activist/comedian Mark Thomas at the 2007 Birmingham Police and Security Fair : […] In the middle of the hall was Mr Xia, a Chinese man with three...
08/08/07 -
Global Voices - As it is sometimes the case for sub-Saharan African nations, the Malagasy diaspora carries a substantial weight of the cultural, political and virtual activities related to Madagascar. In the World Wide Web, the bandwidth limitation is a major encumbrance to a larger participation of bloggers from Madagascar in the global conversation. Still, the Malagasy blogosphere as a whole has steadily grown...
08/07/07 -
Temas Blog - Minas Gerais is moving to accomplish something no other Brazilian state — or probably any Latin American/ Caribbean (LAC) nation, for that matter — has yet done: digitize its environmental inspection and enforcement. Currently Minas is winding up a pilot project in which its 21 waste and sanitation inspectors do much of their work utilizing palmtop computers. While palmtops are no longer...
08/07/07 -
Kashmir Blog - A recent worldwide poll carried out by reliable agencies has come up with the conclusion that most people in the world do not think that there is a clash of civilizations between Islam and the West. For some reasons I just don't feel comfortable labeling all these countries collectively as being the "West". For one, where does east stop and the west start? Is Turkey, Russia, and Albania west? Is...
08/07/07 -
Hamid Tehrani - A group of Iranian bloggers have started a movement to remember and create awareness about several university students that have been arrested in recent months, including three who are still in prison. The idea for the campaign is to rename as many blogs as possible to “August the 5th” (14th of Mordad in the Iranian calendar). The detainees' families say the students — all in their early...
08/06/07 -
The Rest of Us - Foreign policy has been a political and social hot button for as long as I can remember and has been a controversial challenge for most nations throughout history. Our political parties, as well as public opinion, have flip-flopped over the years, usually depending upon the latest overseas mess, as to whether we should be involved in the business of other nations or not. The pendulum has regularly...
08/06/07 -
World Politics Review - During the past seven years, according to Serbian Minister of Foreign Affairs Vuk Jeremic, Serbia has held democratic elections, established a market economy and strived for active participation in NATO's Partnership for Peace program. Jeremic, who met with reporters at the National Press Club in Washington on July 27, says that for Democracy to now truly flourish in the Balkans, the tiny province...
08/06/07 -
Chile From Within - And Chileans go crazy…well some of them. This is a clash of generations, of conceptions of democracy, of class and of course monopoly and emerging markets. On first glance, the agreement, signed on May 9th, 2007 provides an official platform of voluntary cooperation between Microsoft Chile and the Chilean government to provide software, knowledge and training to areas of Chilean civil society...
08/05/07 -
Syria Comment - Aoun supporters putting on a show. Lebanon may be the only country where elections produce as much party fever as they do in the US. And to think that these two ladies might be branded as terror-supporters by George Bush's new executive order sanctioning anti-March 14 activity. In Beirut, the vote for Eido's seat was expected to be easily won by Mohammed al-Amin Itani, a candidate of parliament...
08/05/07 -
EU Referendum - While the UK has suffered a miserable summer, with torrential rain, floods and unseasonable chills, southern Europe has had an ever worse time with scorching heat and a rash of uncontrollable forest fires. Latest has been the conflagration in El Tanque on the Canary island of Tenerife, Spain, where some 11,000 people had to be evacuated while, in Gran Canaria island, a four-day-old fire burnt out...
08/05/07 -
Abu Aardvark - Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has refused to accept the resignations of the six Sunni members who quit last week, probably because he loves them so much and can't imagine Cabinet meetings without them. That kind of make-believe response may be enough to convince those Americans who want to be convinced that he's trying, though. Bush reportedly had private phone conversations with Iraqi President...
08/03/07 -
Fifty Viss - Yesterday, National Convention (NC) delegates reconvened for a final session at Nyaunghnapin. There, NC chairman Thein Sein reiterated and stressed the need to stick to the ‘basic principles’ made in 1996 and the need to follow the six objectives, 5 of which are honorable (on keeping Burma together, creating a multi-party democracy, and nourishing justice, equality and liberty in Burma) and the...
08/03/07 -
Foreign Policy Watch - Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack wrote a widely-cited op-ed in The New York Times recently pointing to major areas of progress in Iraq. They argued that militarily, the surge was proving a success. Sunni militants are now fighting al-Qaeda in Anbar, Iraqi police units are becoming more capable, and civilian casualties are down substantially since the surge began. But -- and here's the catch --...
08/03/07 -
Opinio Juris - Another little news item that I forgot to post about this week: A court of appeals in Paris on Wednesday released two Rwandans from custody despite acknowledging both were the subject of arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Not surprisingly, the Rwandan government (already barely on speaking terms with the French government) is not happy about this. I...
08/02/07 -
Phanari - We're back at the crucial subject of the independent Muslim state in the Balkans: Kosovo. Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs on Monday hosted her weekly Blogtalk Radio Broadcast and devoted it largely to the situation on the Balkans. In particular of further evidence what really happened in Bosnia during the war and the intricacies relating to the establishment of an independent state in the Serbian...
08/02/07 -
3rd World View - As I type now nearly 20 million people in South Asia are stranded due to massive floods. The main reason is the incessant rain across the region since mid-June had caused the snows in Himalaya region melt and the river banks were inundated with excess water. By now more than 1000 people have died in this region alone. Click here for pictures of floods in Asia.Now it seems that this year flood will...
08/02/07 -
Greg Mankiw - We, the undersigned, have serious concerns about the recent protectionist sentiments coming from Congress, especially with regards to China. By the end of this year, China will most likely be the United States' second largest trading partner. Over the past six years, total trade between the two countries has soared, growing from $116 billion in 2000 to almost $343 billion in 2006. That's an average...
08/02/07 -
Indian Economy - INSEAD Affiliate Professor Patrick Turner surmises that the speed of entrepreneurship development in China is likely to erase the lead that India currently enjoys in entrepreneurship over its northern neighbour. In his view, the entrepreneurship bandwagon in both the countries has been fueled by a combination of a number of overseas residents returning to the homeland and local residents eager for...
08/02/07 -
Live Science - The legendary city of Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great as he swept through Egypt in his quest to conquer the known world. Now scientists have discovered hidden underwater traces of a city that existed at Alexandria at least seven centuries before Alexander the Great arrived, findings hinted at in Homer's Odyssey and that could shed light on the ancient world. Alexandria was founded in...
08/02/07 -
Russia Blog - To mark the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's memoir of exile, My American Years, the German magazine Der Spiegel recently published an interview with the 88 year-old Russian writer. While many Westerners today argue that Putin's Russia is resurrecting the Soviet Union, Mr. Solzhenitsyn, who actually survived the Gulag, has a very different view of modern Russian history. In the years since...
08/01/07 -
Dissident News - Unsurprisingly, George W. Bush’s announcement of a “surge” in Iraq came despite the firm opposition to any such move of Americans and the even stronger opposition of the (thoroughly irrelevant) Iraqis. It was accompanied by ominous official leaks and statements – from Washington and Baghdad – about how Iranian intervention in Iraq was aimed at disrupting our mission to gain victory, an...
08/01/07 -
Iraq The Model - I wouldn't be exaggerating if I said hat today has been as exciting as one of those election days in Baghdad. Our national soccer team is playing for the Asian cup for the first time in its history. By comparison this is as if the American team is playing for the cup of Copa America against the team of Brazil or Argentina! But of course here in Iraq we care way more about soccer than Americans do....
08/01/07 -
abuaardvark - The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood faced an impossible situation in last month's Shura Council elections. Highly controversial Constitutional revisions designed to prevent its legitimate political participation had come into effect, large numbers of Brothers including some of the most senior leaders were in prison, and the government was fairly explicit in its plans to fix the elections against whatever...
07/31/07 -
Venezuela News And Views - Chavez is trying to make a career out of accusing George Bush of everything that is evil in the world, including everything in Venezuela where all the failures of chavismo are blamed on one or another CIA conspiracy. However Chavez looks much more like Bush than some of his followers would care to admit. For example the unconditional support to underlings that messed it up big time. The way that...
07/31/07 -
WIMNONLINE - So India has got its first female president. So what? Is her election “a victory for women in a country where gender discrimination is deep-rooted and widespread,” as the Associated Press report suggested? Does her elevation to the largely ceremonial post represent “a step forward for hundreds of millions of Indian women and girls who face bitter discrimination in everyday life,” as The...
07/29/07 -
Contentions - Today, Condoleezza Rice and her Indian counterpart Shri Pranab Mukherjee issued a joint statement that their two countries completed negotiations on the long-stalled nuclear pact, known as the 123 agreement. Under this agreement, the United States will provide nuclear fuel and equipment to India for the first time in three decades. Before it can be implemented, however, the U.S. Congress, the...
07/29/07 -
TPM Muckraker.com - For years, the Bush administration has lived in fear of this moment. The formal consensus view of the U.S. intelligence community is that Pakistan's federally administrated tribal areas ("FATA" is the new jargon-y acronym, natch) is al-Qaeda's new "safehaven," where the al-Qaeda Senior Leadership (similarly, AQSL) is reconstituting its "Homeland attack capability." Now comes the hard question: what...
07/29/07 -
Syria Comment - I am heading for the mountains and my father-in-law's village for a few days before flying back to the States. Just a few observations before I get onto a bus for Qadmous. I will not be posting for a few days. Syria's new policy on Lebanon, begun with president's speech two weeks ago, is to stop public pronouncements on Lebanon, tell Western diplomats what they want to hear - that Syria will do what...
07/27/07 -
FPW - It's rare to read thoughtful analysis on Hezbollah in the American press. Usually, discussion about the Lebanese militant group is hawkish and overly militaristic, caught up in the details about how best to "wipe them out." The general consensus amongst most analysts seems to be that Israel, in its campaign against Hezbollah last summer, just didn't go far enough. If they'd only been willing to...
07/27/07 -
Indian Economy Blog - Here's something for Mr Reddys of the world. India exports software engineers, while large parts of its government have primitive (or non-existent) computer systems. India exports doctors and nurses, that, given the dismal state of its public healthcare system should be very troubling. India exports workers who build roads and highways in other countries, while its own roads are pathetic. India...
07/27/07 -
WSJBLOG - This summer's devastating floods in Britain expose how decisions about growing vast amounts of grain to feed animals have left the country’s food supply in precarious shape, says Graham Harvey in the U.K.’s Guardian. flood gifSince the 1970s, Britain’s wheat-growing area has doubled. Wheat is an energy-intensive crop that requires decent weather at harvest time. At the same time, cereal...
07/26/07 -
VNV - Over the past few months we have been told constantly that the closing of RCTV had nothing to do with censorship, that it was just a "non renewal" of a license because, you know, there was the need to create a different media system, not beholden to any disgusting commercial interest. Well, this week we were brutally reminded that all is just a charade and that the only objective of the government...
07/26/07 -
Or Does It - The Grand Mufti of Egypt said he stands by his comments on apostasy and the right to choose one's religion in his On Faith article last Sunday despite reports in the Egyptian press to the contrary. Egypt's official religious advisor has ruled that Muslims are free to change their faith as it is a matter between an individual and God... Hossam Bahgat of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights,...
07/26/07 -
RBC - The only serious argument offered by those who want to maintain U.S. military presence in Iraq is that terrible things will happen if we leave. Terrible things might also happen, of course, if we stay. And there's no good reason to think that the terrible things that will happen when we leave two years from now would be any less terrible than those that would happen if we left by next summer. So,...
07/25/07 -
Captain's Quarters - The stalemate between the Israelis and the Palestinians ironically started to melt when Hamas conducted a coup in Gaza. Now the Arab League, nervous about Iran's growing influence in the region, has decided to take the unprecedented step of officially sending representatives to Israel to begin peace talks: "Arab League envoys paid a historic visit to Israel on Wednesday to present a plan calling...
07/25/07 -
EU Referendum - We are not going to say, "told you so", because we do not have enough details. But this report is disturbing. It recounts that, yesterday a British soldier was killed and two others injured by a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan, while riding in a Pinzgauer Vector. The soldier, from the 1st Battalion The Royal Anglian Regiment, died after an attack on a patrol in the outskirts of Sangin in...
07/25/07 -
Foreign Policy Watch - Things have rarely looked so bleak in Pakistan. On the strategic level, the recent NIE suggests that al Qaeda is resurgent in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and we have less support from the Musharraf regime than previously believed. As Spencer Ackerman says, "Pakistan 2007 is Afghanistan 2001." And what about the fallout from the Red Mosque crisis? My predictions aside, it seems...
07/25/07 -
Pharmalot - China is set to cut export incentives on close to 3,000 different products, including active pharmaceutical ingredients, beginning this month, according to PharmAsia News. The Ministry of Finance and the State Administration of Taxation cut the tax rebate rate 13 percent to 5 percent for some API's as of July 1. As a result, prices of most APIs have already gone up. These include antipyretic and...
07/25/07 -
Redstate - The proximate target of these remarks is Jean-Claude Trichet, the chairman of the independent European Central Bank (ECB). Sarkozy and Trichet have danced this dance before, as we shall see. Europe's economy is strengthening and unemployment is falling. Trichet has raised euro interest rates several times since 2005, and is set to do so again. This makes the euro appreciate against the dollar...
07/24/07 -
The Fourth Rail - Abdullah Mehsud, one of the most powerful leaders of the Taliban in South, has been killed during a raid in the southern district of Zhob in Baluchistan province. The Taliban commander killed himself by detonating a hand grenade as “a team of Law-Enforcement Agencies (LEA) conducted a raid on the house of a Jamait-e-Ulema Islam (JUI)'s local leader,” the Kuwaiti news Agency reported. Abdullah’s...
07/24/07 -
Barbados Underground - Politically, socially and economically the decline is evident. For those of us who have experienced living in Barbados and the wider Caribbean in the 70’s and most of the 80’s the comparison to the current state of affairs must be triggering all kinds of fears. What deserves special mention is the inability of present day leaders to develop policies which address the political, social and economic...
07/23/07 -
Physorg - With two volcanoes continuously active for the past 11 years, the Russian Academy of Sciences is warning seismic activity has intensified at a third volcano, the Bezymyanny, Itar-Tass news agency reported Monday. An eruption occurred at Bezymyanny in May with heated gas, steam and rock fragments pouring down the volcano slope onto the village of Klyuchi some 25 miles away. A spokesman for...
07/23/07 -
Burkean Reflections - Chinese productive dynamism is causing concern among trading partners (China's unfair trade practices are at issue), and the overheating of Chinese economy could result in contractionary policies destablizing to the Chinese state. What's interesting about China's rise, though, is how the strong economic numbers outstrip indicators of social indicators of prosperity and sustainability....
07/20/07 -
Middle East Journal - BAGHDAD -- Never again will I complain about the inconvenience and discomfort of airports and civilian airline travel delays. You won’t either if make your way from Kuwait to Baghdad in July during a war. Military planes leave Kuwait every couple of hours for Baghdad International Airport (or BIAP, pronounced BIE-op). The United States Army’s media liaison in Kuwait dropped me off at the airfield...
07/20/07 -
American Infidel's Musts - Political commentators in the West have used up much ink in their search for moderate Muslims. Everybody agrees that if the terrorists who parade under the banners of Islam (but who have killed hundreds of times more Muslims than people of other faiths) are to be defeated, then this can be accomplished only within the Islamic world, in the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of Muslims. But...
07/20/07 -
The Fourth Rail - The Taliban campaign against Pakistani government and military targets is intensifying. Three more suicide attacks were conducted in western Pakistan today, resulting in over 49 killed and 56 wounded. The suicide bombers targeted a police college in Hangu, a mosque in Kohat in the Northwest Frontier Province, and a convoy transporting Chinese engineers in the town of Hub in Baluchistan. At least...
07/20/07 -
WorldPress - In recent weeks, the Brazilian government has turned to the difficult task of building giant hydroelectric dams in the Amazon River. The project presents President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva with a major contradiction—between his ambitious economic development plan based on large-scale infrastructure, and the enormous social and environmental costs of the dams. On the one hand, dam construction...
07/20/07 -
Stumbling and Mumbling - Tom Miller bewails the fact that New Labour has not done enough to increase equality, and calls upon the party to be more amibitious. But I'm not sure social democrats can do much to increase equality, for at least 5 reasons: 1. The median voter problem. There may be a good economic reason why people on £50,000 a year get tax credits - the alternative is even higher marginal withdrawal rates on...
07/19/07 -
Middle East Journal - President Bush's speech Monday about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reminded me of an old joke: A physicist, a chemist, and an economist are stranded on an island with nothing to eat, and a can of soup washes ashore. The physicist says, "Let’s smash the can open with a rock." The chemist says, "Let’s build a fire and heat the can first." And the economist says, "Assume a can opener." The Bush...
07/19/07 -
The Energy Blog - Air Products, in partnership with Hellas Air Pro Ltd., recently supplied a new state of the art submarine of the Hellenic Navy with hydrogen. The HDW Class 214 submarine has a fuel cell-generated power supply, allowing it to operate entirely on hydrogen. The fuel cell, which produces electrical energy from oxygen and hydrogen, allows the new submarine to cruise under water for up to three weeks...
07/19/07 -
The Faculty Blog - With all the attention devoted to the elections, a remarkable story has been neglected: By 2009, China is now expected to be the world's leading emitter of greenhouse gases, surpassing the United States. This is a stunning finding, because even recent estimates had seen the United States as no. 1, and China as no. 2, as late as 2020 or 2025. In terms of international controls on greenhouse gases,...
07/18/07 -
EU Referendum - Friends of the Earth Europe, the group pre-eminent in lobbying the EU for tighter controls to combat global warming, received €635,000 in funding from the EU commission last year. That, with additional funds from German, Austrian and Dutch ministries of environment, plus contributions from the United Nations Environment Programme, accounted for over fifty percent of the group's income, making...
07/18/07 -
African Loft - A brain drain or human capital flight, according to Wikipedia, is an emigration of trained and talented individuals (”human capital”) to other nations or jurisdictions, due to conflicts, lack of opportunity, health hazards where they are living, discrimination or other reasons. It parallels the term “capital flight” which refers to financial capital that is no longer invested in the country...
07/18/07 -
Real Russia Project - 50% of Russians expect President Vladimir V. Putin to run for a third consecutive term, according to a poll released this week by Renaissance Capital. Just one in three voters believe the President's promise that he will step down after the March 2008 elections. The Russian constitution currently forbids three consecutive Presidential terms, although it would not prohibit Putin from running for...
07/17/07 -
Opinio Juris - At least that's my guess, based on yesterday's news reports that President Putin had signed a decree that will lead to Russia's suspension of its participation in the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE). For those unfamiliar with it, the CFE constituted a landmark arms control agreement, establishing parity in major conventional forces and armaments between NATO and the then-Warsaw...
07/16/07 -
FPWatch - Pervez Musharraf is often touted as an important ally in the war on terrorism. With his strong control over the military, he has cracked down on Islamic militants operating in Waziristan and other parts of northern Pakistan. Or so we've heard. Fredrick Grare, in a new report from the Carnegie Center for International Peace, thinks that we're being duped. He suggests that Musharraf is not so...
07/11/07 -
Real Russia Project - The International Economic Forum held last week in St. Petersburg has proven to be a major public relations success for Russian business and government executives. The event fueled mostly positive news coverage around the world focused on Russia’s growing economy. Even American newspapers like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal that are usually pessimistic about Russia acknowledged...
07/11/07 -
Venezuela News and Views - Sometimes I think that the only person in Venezuela who thinks, or pretends to think that all is fine is Chavez. We could argue ad nauseam that things are more or less going good or bad, but anyone that has to drive through Venezuelan roads can see all the squatters here and there, all the industrial plants which have been now closed for more than 3 years, all the immense traffic delays due to...
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