East Timor: The would be assassins of Timornese President José Ramos-Horta and Prime Minister Xanana Gusmão have been given sentences ranging from 16 to 24 years in prison. This would-be junta rebels was mostly composed of disaffected police and military. This blog detailed the events that preceded this trial in more detail, here. Indonesia: Another […]
The Awami League government has promised that it will not halt any ‘pro-people’ public policy works that were initiated by the previous BNP led coalition government. Speaking to Dr. Margaret Chan, the Director General of the World Health Organization, the Prime Minister reaffirmed her commitment to social development in far-flung villages. To cite just one […]
The Awami League released the following after CNN rated Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed as the sixth most powerful woman in Asia. More important that the fact of her rating is the reasons she was rated as such. “Awami League President & Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has been rated as the sixth most powerful women […]
The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington D.C. think tank, has a new project on its research agenda: Tocqueville On China, an intellectual experiment that channels the penetrating observations of the French political observer Alexis de Tocqueville in order to elucidate the current state of China’s civil society. According to the project’s mission statement, this […]
On International Women’s Day, March 07, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina declared that the Awami League “will eradicate gender discrimination from Bangladesh by 2021, the golden jubilee of the country’s Independence.” Speaking in Dhaka, she reminded her audience that though Islam secures women’s procedural and property rights, the BNP-Jamaat coalition, the previous government in power, made […]
China can be less “hurried” on the Iran nuclear question, a scholar with a key PRC think tank wrote last week. Writing in an op-ed for the Party mouthpiece Global Times, Gao Zugui argued for calm in the face of Western pressure over Iranian sanctions and to “be less rushed, more independent, less tied-up.” This […]
The Guardian published an op-ed by Simon Chestertman and Kishore Mahbubani today. Though a run-down of the pragmatic way countries in Asia have dealt with global challenges, the article features Brac and Grameen Bank prominently. “Asia has emerged as a leader in social entrepreneurship. The successes of social businesses such as Grameen Bank and Brac in Bangladesh have contributed […]
The Bangladesh Rifles, the unit of the military that revolted against its own military officers will be changing its name to the Border Guards Bangladesh. As the BBC reports: “It is not clear how much the changes will cost. Several trials are under way of thousands of border guards accused of taking part in the […]
How did Commodore Matthew Perry convince the Tokugawa bakufu to accept his terms and conditions, and open up Japan? A persuasive Power Point presentation, according to Hayashi Yuuji. This is just too good to keep to myself – apologies to non-Japanese readers.
Just as quickly as Japan watchers fell silent on Futenma, they’ve picked it back up. This is nothing if not expected: it wasn’t until PM Yukio Hatoyama and his party offered up a policy proposal for the protracted re-negotiations that much else could be said on the topic. They promised an answer by May, and […]
I have realized that whenever I need ironic humor, I look up Pakistani papers and almost always, there is something that puts a smile on my face. For example, I was looking at Dawn today and read this mind boggling headline: ‘Demand for Pakistani weapons increasing rapidly.’ Imagine, a country like Pakistan that is entirely dependent […]
It seems that though I rail about the dearth of international media coverage on Bangladesh, nevertheless, I often miss important pieces that speak to Bangladesh’s opportunities–missed opportunities, perhaps–to make of itself a model, inclusive Muslim democracy. (For all my equivocations, I cannot reject the reality that both leading parties in Bangladeshi politics have long ceded […]
The latest IMF report on the health and stability of the Bangladeshi economy is, on the whole, quite positive. The IMF analysts claim that with respect to Bangladesh’s economy “financial contagion was contained by low levels of financial integration. Growth, estimated at 5.9 percent for FY09, decelerated only modestly from the pace recorded in recent years and […]
The International Crisis Group (ICG) recently published a report on Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB). I’ve been writing about the group and their wider ties to Harkatul Jihad al Islam, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the rightist Jamaat-e-Islami party in Bangladesh. The connections, ferreted out and mapped already, span the Indian Subcontinent and have now begun to spread, taken […]
Indonesia: As an update to the growing backlash in SE Asia over the China-ASEAN FTA, the Berita Jakarta is already blaming the FTA on a decline in exports from Jakarta: It can be seen from the decline in the city’s export value by 4.80 percent or US$ 2.828 billion in January this year, from that […]
