Timing is everything in the World Cup. Try, if you can, to think back two weeks. If you had an only partially clear crystal ball and you had been told that South Africa would draw Mexico and defeat France you’d have believed that South Africa would rejoice. And that is exactly what happened. Yet as […]
An early summer heat-wave has scorched the Gulf with record temperatures and terminal power-outages are leaving few Iraqis with any way to beat the heat, but plenty to complain about.
Afghanistan is so boring to cover. Sometimes I just sit at my desk screaming in my head ‘SOMETHING HAPPEN ALREADY!!!’ So Gen. McChrystal is now a goner and Gen. Petraeus is back to save the day yet again. Anyway you cut it, this is a sad situation that can only make a difficult situation even […]
Can anything as shameful as the recent Bhopal verdict have a silver lining?
As has been well documented over the last few years, anti-semitism is on the rise in Europe, often masked as anti-Israel sentiments. However, the anti-semitic mentality also emerges on its own, with Europeans desecrating Jewish graves, spray painting swastikas in Jew-heavy areas, and other acts. Well, not everyone is taking it lying down. The Dutch […]
Three months after international observers hailed Iraq’s parliamentary elections as a resounding success for sovereignty and civil society, the nation’s fragile democracy is suffering a withering swell of political violence.
Michael Hastings’s article about Gen. McChrystal and the Afghanistan war effort has not only created quite a stir, but may even cost Gen. McChrystal his job as the leader of all armed forces in Afghanistan. While, I will write more on this important story tonight, I’ll give a few thoughts now. First off, I think […]
Hot on the heels of WSJ’s Real Time Japan comes PanOrient News, a new Japan-themed internet service. According to its launch announcement: “PanOrient News is a collaboration between Shingetsu Institute Executive DirectorMichael Penn and the company’s founder, Khaldon Azhari, aiming to challenge the frail grip of the existing English-language news services in Japan with an […]
Cambodia: Corruption and illiberalism pays according to an article running at the Asian Times. The author believes that Cambodian foreign aid has continued to increase, despite Hun Sen’s continued political oppression of the opposition, due to the West’s fear that any decline in aid flows would create a void that will most certainly filled by […]
So I have made my way to Durban, on KwaZulu-Natal’s Indian Ocean Coast and South Africa’s favorite summer holiday getaway. Just a few hours in and I already feel rejuvenated. For a host of reasons — weather, the isolation of my B+B, an inability or unwillingness to adjust to a normal sleep schedule, typical mid-trip […]
Last April, Russia and Norway came to an agreement on the delimitation of the maritime border between their two countries in the Barents Sea, ending a forty year dispute. Now at this year’s St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the two countries’ main gas producers, Gazprom and Statoil, have signed a science and technology agreement to […]
I’ll try to pull together some news and analysis in one post. It might strike, you, the reader, as odd that the days news gets separated into digestible chunks, when the foodstuff is run through and through with rough hewn complexity and inter-related dependence. This has everything to do with the news business model, of […]
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