Nestled among gorgeous mountains, blessed with exotic cuisine, and loved for its arts and outgoing people, Georgia has many suitors. Long courted by her northern Russian neighbor, she has in recent years been beset by foreign admirers, bearing gifts of “democracy” and “growth” that (they promise) will ensure she lives happily ever after. With parliamentary […]
Recent public opinion polls in Russia showed that an approval rating for the Russian President Vladimir Putin fell to its lowest level since December 2011, when thousands rallied against parliamentary election fraud, chanting “Putin should go.” In the meantime, the share of those who hold negative outlook of Putin’s presidency reached 35 percent, compared to […]
Europe has spoken Mitt Romney is not an attractive option to lead the U.S. for the next four years. The polls published by the reliable German Marshall Fund and the British poll YouGov offer interesting results on the perceptions of Europeans on the two U.S. presidential candidates. According to the Financial Times, the poll from […]
News reports are awash with an alleged “open feud” between U.S. President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu over an Iran strike. Even though the United States repeated said that no options are off the table to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, the media–and even Israeli officials–are casting the Obama administration […]
The country really isn’t a global competitor to the United States “The Competition that Really Matters,” a new report jointly released by the Center for American Progress (a think tank with close ties to the Obama administration) and the Center for the Next Generation, contends that America’s competitive position is being eroded by the emergence of […]
Formal diplomatic relations between Iran and Canada were developed in the late 1950s. As with most relationships, they have experienced their share of ups and downs. While the international community, mainly through the United Nations, mollified many of the pair’s issues over the years, the duo’s fragile relationship reached a breaking point on September 7, […]
SDS-Ugol, a major coal producer in Russia, has announced plans to build a new seaport outside of Murmansk that will accommodate up to 18 million tons of coal exports a year. Many of the company’s coal mines are located in the Kuzbass region in Siberia. From there, much of the coal is shipped by rail […]
So now we know for sure: Putin “enjoys events involving the participation of fauna” (his own words). The whole world has seen the Russian president swanning around (he he, see what I did there?) on his ultralight, pursued by just two disorientated looking cranes. The spectacle was so bizarre that, beyond a few zany pictures and […]
What a bizarre turn of events! The Marikana miners’ case took yet another twist as media reports that all charges against the 270 South African miners arrested for murder following their clash with the South African police two weeks ago were dropped this week. Initially, after having 34 of their colleagues killed and many more […]
As Malaysia celebrated its 55th anniversary of independence on Friday, Muslim separatists in southern Thailand marked the occasion with a string of coordinated bomb attacks across the country’s three restive, Islamic-majority provinces. On Hari Merdeka, the day which Malaysia commemorates its freedom from British colonial rule, ethnic Malays hung Malaysian flags from light poles and […]
It essentially was an accident. Saddam Hussein had been whipped in the 1991 Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush called on Iraq’s Kurds and Shia to rise up. They did — but Bush was all talk; there was no U.S. military help and they were slaughtered. So as Kurdish refugees clung to the freezing […]
“Germany’s been going downhill for years. We’re the losers of globalization. The politicians want us to believe the only solution is to work harder. But the politicians are the puppets for big business. They say unemployment’s falling, and we’re still the world’s export champions. But in reality, the poor are getting poorer and the rich, […]
[Eugene Terre’Blanche against the backdrop of an AWB flag, From The Guardian via Google Images] I hope you will all forgive my recent break from blogging. But I am back and plan to resume regular posting starting now. Obviously a great deal has transpired across the continent in recent weeks. And nowhere has seen fissures […]
United4Iran’s Director of Programs and Advocacy, Dokhi Fassihian, published the following piece in the Huffington Post ahead of the UN Chief’s visit to Iran this week. Despite calls in some quarters for him to skip out, the UN Secretary General plans to travel to Iran next week, a country that has become a dungeon for its own […]
Canada may have the second largest oil reserves in the world, but the vast majority are locked up in Alberta’s oil sands, far from any ocean. That means that pipelines are needed to transport the oil west to ports on Canada’s Pacific Coast or south to markets in the United States. With President Barack Obama […]