From August 6 – 11, the “Northern Sea Route to Strategic Stability and Equal Partnership in the Arctic” conference is taking place aboard the Yamal, a Russian nuclear icebreaker. Representatives from all eight Arctic states, along with several Russian ministers and policymakers, are in attendance. The icebreaker will travel west from the port of Varendey […]
Santosh Hegde blows the lid on another mega-scandal The latest malefaction to explode in India’s seemingly unending season of scandals concerns the illegal mining and export of iron-ore deposits in the southwestern state of Karnataka. According to an extensive report – some 25,000 pages in length, with the summary running almost 500 – released […]
Cyril Ramaphosa is the potential game changer in South African politics. The master negotiator for the ANC during the CODESA process that ultimately led to 1994’s elections and the end of apartheid chose the path of business rather than politics after the mid-1990s. Yet there have long been whispers, hints, and yearnings for Ramaphosa to […]
Prime Minister Naoto Kan’s administration announced Thursday that it would fire three senior policy officials over allegations that the government had grown too friendly with the nuclear power industry. The three officials that the Trade and Industry Minister, Banri Kaieda, canned were Kazuo Matsunaga, Vice Minister for Economy, Trade and Industry; Nobuaki Terasaka, head of […]
There is a common misconception that China is an actual member state of ASEAN. Indeed, China is not one of the ten member states that make up the organization. An interesting fact about this regional institution is that during its earlier years, two of the member states – Indonesia and Vietnam – had their own […]
At The New York Times Magazine, Nate Silver decided to try to apply his analytical chops to the question of “where to get the world’s best service.” He basically links standard tipping rates with survey responses about the customer service people received in 24 countries. The takeaway: All of this brings us to the Tipping […]
Dangerous political deadlock The ratification process of former Justice Minister Bernard Honorat Gousse, President Michel Martelly’s second nominee for prime minister, came down to the controversial divide between the technical or procedural vote and the political or personal vote. “I would vote against Gousse even if the other 29 senators voted for him,” declared Senator […]
A joint undercover investigation by BBC Newsnight and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has uncovered evidence that the Ethiopian government is using billions of dollars of development aid as a tool for political oppression. Posing as tourists the team of journalists travelled to the southern region of Ethiopia.There they found villages where whole communities are […]
Today marks the 66th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. At a ceremony held at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park today, Prime Minister Naoto Kan drew parallels between the atomic bombing and the ongoing nuclear crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. He took the opportunity to expound on the importance for Japan to […]
“What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, so much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.” — John Hersey, Hiroshima Early in the morning of August 6th, 1945 — 66 years ago today — the […]
In a recent piece I authored at Dissent Magazine, I remarked about the ever-expanding income discrepancy between the rich and poor that has come to characterize Thailand as the region’s most evident and relevant example of class warfare. Not only were the results of the recent elections last month a manifestation of a nation-state’s proletariat […]
Over two dozen House Democrats are preparing a week-long trip to Israel and the West Bank only a month out from Palestinian attempts to unilaterally declare statehood and days after reports surfaced that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has reversed his opposition to using 1967 borders as the baseline for negotiations. The group of Democrats […]
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