Regions

According to the New York Times, Pakistan’s military is maneuvering to remove the current government. This, according to the paper, is because of corruption and lack of proper response to the flood. What is missing from the report is that once this government is gone, angels and superheroes are going to takeover and they will […]

However disgracefully he was forced out, let’s get one thing straight: Luzhkov was a dirty crook. And so is the interim Mayor. Today’s New York Times grandly muses about the ‘two sides’ of Luzhkov – the top city manager who turned Moscow from a “trash-strewn” dump to a “humming megalopolis of skyscrapers, luxury boutiques and […]

Last April, amid the Scud missile kerfuffle, Blake Hounshell called Syria “The dumbest country in the Middle East” on the Foreign Policy magazine blog. (He didn’t even have the common decency to capitalize Dumbest and Country.) I’ll be curious to see if Blake repeats the claim after the Russian Foreign Minister confirmed this month that […]

Well, I just finished the 1st of Bob Woodward’s three-part series ‘Obama’s War’ in the Washington Post and came away keying a different aspect than Woodward and likely the Obama administration wanted to get across. Woodward’s main theme in this first section is that the high brass of the US military (Mullen, McChrystal, Petraeus) failed […]

It seems Bangladesh has now become involved in the Taliban’s game of threats and offensives. The Daily Star reports that Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Special Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan forwarded on a request to Foreign Minister Dipu Moni that the government of Bangladesh send troops to help secure Afghanistan against Taliban advances.  The Taliban have […]

Here is an interesting take on the situation from Taiwan based blogger, Michael Turton.  Warning: Michael is un-apologetically pro-Taiwan, but I believe his take on this issue is quite astute: Context: China kicked up a massive fuss in the world media and put a on a show for the home crowd. Yet in February Russia […]

Zainab Jeewanjee discusses Bob Woodwards book, Obama Wars and it’s reference to Pakistan. As President Obama goes head to head with the military establishment in trying to wind down the war in Afghanistan, he consistently calls for a shift in focus to Pakistan. However, Jeewanjee highlights that the Presidents National Security Strategy from May 2010, offers little, if any clearly spelled out approach to achieving our objectives in Pakistan. She concludes that a more practical, specific approach to Pakistan must exist should the President shift focus to Pakistan as the “epicenter of violence” as the National Security Strategy recommends.

On RIA Novosti’s talk show “Russian Angle,” host Andrei Zolotov recently interviewed Viktor Boyarski, Chairman of the Russian Geographic Society’s Polar Committee. The two discussed the International Arctic Forum on the Arctic, which took place in Moscow from September 22-23. The five-minute video can be seen online here. While Russian news in English is ostensibly […]

The International Arctic Forum took place in Moscow, Russia last week. Hosted by the Russian Geographical Society at Moscow State University, the conference was initially supposed to take place in April until the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull disrupted air travel. Entitled “The Arctic: Territory of Dialogue,” the two-day conference was home to a number of discussions […]

The Israeli intelligence services and the IDF have suffered some set backs of late that many critics have suggested indicates Israeli clandestine operations are in a free fall. “What happened to the days where (future Prime Minister and Defense Minister Ehud) Barack snuck into PLO headquarters in drag to assassinate some of the world’s most […]

Iran has confirmed that 30,000 computers have been infected with the “Stuxnext” worm. The worm has affected the Bushehr nuclear facility. According to reports this sort of worm could only be created by a government sanctioned hacking effort. Of course the prime suspects are Israel, Europe and the U.S. What’s interesting is that the worm affected […]

Making African history accessible to students below the college level has sadly never been much of a priority in the US. The emergence of Africa Access Review should help.