from the China Balance Sheet: China's economic modernization has lifted almost 400 million citizens out of poverty since 1990, but 415 million Chinese still live on less than $2 per day.
China is working to review oil policy and strategy to determine the most favorable path forward to “bolster” oil company profits and avoid [prolong] rising fuel costs. One large driver for this effort is the upcoming Olympic games, which has been a sore spot for the country politically and logistically these past several months. Ensuring a plan is […]
“To be honest, they abandoned us.” Unnamed Uzbek who fled the country in April, voicing his displeasure with the West's rapprochement with the Karimov regime. The three year anniversary of the Andijon incident in Uzbekistan is upon us and I have found two interesting articles discussing its significance in the here and now, mainly regarding […]
Being accused of excessive seriousness is not something Russians expect or covet. We pride ourselves on a sense of irreverent humour, irony and ability to exist in often self-destructive fantasy worlds. In fact, part of what saved the country's 'soul’ during Communism was the widespread popular subversion of that ideology's central tenants of seriousness and […]
President Suleiman asked Fuad Siniora to form the next cabinet. After appointment, Siniora said among others: Premier Rafik Hariri is the reason I stand here, and I promise to fulfill my duties in protecting the state and its institutions and confirming the sovereignty of the law and justice through the International Tribunal. Not surprisingly, FPM, […]
A recent article by Steven Simon in the Foreign Affairs journal is quite an interesting read. It can be read here at RealClearPolitics. The main points of the article are as follows: There should be a distinction made between the Iraqi Sunni insurgents who are nationalists and Al-Qaeda members who poured in from foreign countries […]
Konstantin Kosachev, head of the Duma's Foreign Affairs Committee, has called McCain's proposals to resume nuclear weapons reductions talks with Russia “fully realistic”. Kosachev was quoted in the May 29th issue of the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestiya employing a sports metaphor: “Mr McCain can completely count on the fact that Russia will be ready to engage […]
There has never been any love lost between John McCain and the Evil Empire. As far back as 2006, he had promised to be “very harsh” on Russia. By May 2008, he was still vowing to push through an even earlier 2005 determination (in a bill co-sponsored with Joe Lieberman) to kick Russia out of […]
As a new international rugby season gets underway, the Springboks stand tall as the defending world champions . And yet the country's fans still have a fixation on New Zealand's mighty All Blacks. Mark Keohane wants to shake South Africans from their rugby inferiority complex and make them realize that they support the greatest team […]
Kenya's Standard reports on how environmental issues, high-level politics and ethnic concerns are merging to create another potential flashpoint in that country's tenuous recovery process. The Mau Forest involves a complex interplay of tensions related to conservation and the country's (indeed the region's) environmental health, the prospects for putatively ethnic clashes over land, and tensions […]
Michael Gerson has a blistering column in today's Washington Post about the crisis in Zimbabwe and what he sees as South Africa's enabling of Robert Mugabe's despotism. There is little new in Gerson's column for those who have been following the crisis for a while, but perhaps voices like his will lead to more pressure […]
We’ve had a ‘Good News’ blog and another lighthearted one of various links, but the good times are over! Thanks to Freedom House's newly released Freedom of the Press 2007 Survey, we can put the good feelings behind us as our Central Asian states received bleak, down-trending outlooks. The Survey concluded that Press Freedom was […]
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