While the tiger-hunting, jet flying, oligarch-jailing judo blackbelt may already comfortably be the most powerful man in Russia, Vladimir Putin has never been one to take chances. And it must frustrate the PM that, despite having unlimited resources and virtually no opposition, his approval ratings hover at around 50% while those of his behemoth United […]
Azeri youth activist Jabbar Savalan was convicted last week (4 May) on charges of marijuana possession and sentenced to two and a half years in prison. As readers of this blog may recall, Jabbar was arrested in February after calling for protest actions on Facebook and attending a youth conference in the city of Sumgayit. […]
I have recently written about TAPI, the 1,680 km (1,000 mile) $7.6 billion Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India proposed pipeline scheduled for completion in 2016 with a capacity to transfer 90 million cubic meters of gas per day to energy starved South Asia. According to the TAPI agreement, Turkmenistan will supply 38 mmcmd each going to Pakistan and India, […]
Plagiarism is not something Russians worry about – hell, even Putin lifted his phD thesis, verbatim, out of a US textbook – while his country has occupied the US’s piracy list – home of the world’s largest copyright violators – for twice as many years as China. Not that there’s anything wrong with copying per se: it […]
On May 3, 2011, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry or the Kyrgyzstan Inquiry Commission (KIC) released its final report on the interethnic violence and clashes between the country’s ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbek communities last year. The KIC was formed based on an initiative from the Nordic countries for an independent international inquiry and was […]
The documentary program “Frontline” aired a comprehensive set of documentaries on the occasion of Osama bin Laden’s capture and death. It is an excellent collection, a much better resource for this throbbing, restless time than most newspapers and broadcast journalism outlets. (Though the broadcast is not yet available in its entirety, please find an excerpt […]
The death of the most wanted Islamic militant – a soft spoken, bearded man – came ten years after his most audacious and deadly terrorist act. His killing in a special forces operation placed a giant question mark over the future of the insurgency he had led, but lent an equally big boost to the President’s […]
The Taliban declared that, on Sunday April 31st, they would begin operations on their spring thaw military strategy against “the foreign invading forces“. The Taliban, the self-proclaimed Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, promised to attack U.S and NATO assets and soldiers as well as businessmen who wish to work with Western institutions and agencies. Officials close […]
Twenty five years separates us from the worst nuclear disaster in the history of mankind. I recently wrote about the 50th anniversary of human spaceflight and realized that a mere 25 years also separated April 1986 from Gagarin’s first human spaceflight in April 1961. On an early Saturday morning in April of 1986 at 1:23 […]
President Obama’s expected and whispered about Pentagon reshuffle heralds the likelihood of a rather more rapid draw down in Afghanistan than has been entertained so far. The reshuffle also suggests that in one swift move, President Obama is looking to get the CIA and the Pentagon entire to cooperate on, and finish up well, what […]
There’s no dearth of coverage of well-known philanthropist, and professed education advocate Greg Mortenson’s alleged malfeasance with funding for his renowned Central Asia Institute. The author of the popular volume, “Three Cups of Tea” and advisor to the U.S. military brass there has been accused of pilfering millions of dollars that he raised on the […]
I came across a series of amazing photographs of the Aral Sea by Radek Skrivanek, a photographer who started visiting and documenting the devastation of the Aral shoreline and the surrounding areas since 2004, and returning to the region many times between 2004 and 2007. You can read more about his fascination with the Aral […]
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