Democratic Party of Japan lawmaker Ichiro Ozawa said late Wednesday that he plans to break off from the DPJ and form a new party if the no-confidence motion in DPJ Prime Minister Naoto Kan fails. One hundred members of Kan’s own party are loyal to Ozawa, and 50 of those members plan to side with […]
Jairam Ramesh, India’s maverick environment minister, has raised hackles by questioning the caliber of the country’s premier technology institutions. Yet the angry reactions to his comments are surprising, since his criticism contains nothing that other high-ranking officials in the Union government have not already said.
In this multi-polar world we live in, cooperation among the top three world powers (U.S., China, EU – see my previous post on ‘Triangle World Order’) will be paramount in fixing global problems like the global economic recession, climate change, nuclear proliferation, and now the developments in North Africa and the Middle East. Such efforts […]
As the date for general elections in Thailand draws ever closer, the complexity of the situation has commonly been acknowledged by Southeast Asian commentators, especially with respect to the unknown status of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra. This reality was only augmented following recent statements and actions by some of the parties involved this past […]
U.N. special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, Jorge Bustamante, presented a report on his findings during his visit to Japan in March last year to the U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday. He criticized the Japanese government’s discrimination towards foreign schools, and urged it to do more in guaranteeing the rights of foreign […]
I thought you would be interested in this interview that I did last week for Dawn.com Pakistan’s respected news source. Dr. Stephen Philip Cohen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, Washington DC, is a respected authority on the Pakistani army and the country’s politics. His book The Pakistan Army was published in 1998 and […]
Japan’s opposition parties, the Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito party, have arranged to submit a no-confidence motion against Democratic Party of Japan Prime Minister Naoto Kan and his cabinet, possibly as early as Thursday. By presenting the motion, the two parties are protesting Kan’s handling of the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake […]
I recently had the pleasure of attending an excellent talk at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington D.C. on the way religious education structures pluralism in Pakistan. Matthew Nelson, a Lecturer at SOAS, University of London and a Fellow at the Wilson Center, offered a deeply interesting discussion on ways to think about religious “madrasa” […]
According to a Newsweek Japan feature, stress and lack of privacy is taking its toll on victims of the March 11 quake and tsunami living in evacuee shelters in Japan’s Tohoku region. As the media and politicians are spouting slogans like, “Tohoku people are strong,” “We are all one,” “You will never walk alone,” “One […]
Chapter 2: Post UN Report on War, it is War on the Report in Sri Lanka The Sri Lankan reaction to the UN Report (“Advisory Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka Allegations”) on alleged war crimes committed by the two sides in Sri Lanka has been as emotionally violent as the war itself […]
Recently issued rules from the country’s ominous-sounding “Ministry of Communications and Information Technology” have India’s web junta fuming in indignation.
In a recent piece which appeared on this website, fellow Southeast Asian blogger Rohan Poojara remarked on the potential which microloans could have on the economy of Indonesia, a country suffering from staggering levels of unemployment amongst its youth and which typically has difficulty in obtaining the necessary capital in order to build and expand […]
Telecom company Softbank Corp.’s president Masayoshi Son will shoulder most of the 80 billion yen ($975 million) cost of building 10 large-scale solar power plants. The governors of 19 of Japan’s 47 prefectures have signed on to take part in the project. Shizuoka governor Heita Kawakatsu said: “The (recently shut down) Hamaoka nuclear power plant […]
Japan posted its trade deficit Wednesday and the numbers are bleak. Following the March 11 quake and tsunami that caused a disaster at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, large Japanese manufactures like Sony and Toyota have suspended production. Japanese exports in April fell 12.5 percent from a year earlier. Exports declined to 5.16 trillion […]
A article that I co-authored for The Diplomat: Microfinance is a hot topic in a number of developing countries. Unfortunately, over the last year, it has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. For a start, Muhammad Yunus—the Nobel Prize-winning founder of Grameen Bank—has been pushed out of his job in Bangladesh. In […]
