Last month Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed, in an article for the Foreign Policy Magazine, ‘America’s Pacific Century’! This week, President Obama will be laying the foundation through a series of multilateral meetings involving Pacific Rim countries. He will start with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting in Hawaii (Nov 12th-13th), and continue at […]
I spent the past couple of days in Alberta, Canada. After a brief stop in Edmonton, a group of journalists and I headed to Shell Albian Sands outside Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta. We flew over the boreal forest, where the late fall temperatures had already caused lakes and rivers to freeze under a white […]
Facing his first major judicial-political crisis sparked on Thursday Oct. 27 following the unconstitutional arrest and overnight detention of Deputy Arnel Belizaire, Prime Minister Garry Conille created a three-member commission to help uncover the incident’s hierarchical authors and diffuse escalating tensions. The “Belizaire Affair,” as it is now known, directed the national dialogue for more […]
The eurozone saga (it isn’t a crisis as the Greek word implies a short time-frame) could end happily today – and that has been the case since the whole sorry affair began. All that is necessary is for the European Central Bank to announce that is it willing to back all the debt issued in […]
For the second time in President Calderon’s administration, a secretary of interior (Secretario de Gobernación) has died in what government officials have prematurely dubbed as an aerial accident. Francisco Blake Mora, the de-facto second in command in Mexico’s executive branch, was en route to a conference in the central state of Morelos when his helicopter […]
Ali Abdullah’s continuous refusal to step down is costing Yemen and its neighbors. The tenacious leader’s action is exporting the disaster, living conditions, threat to safety, health and livelihood of refugee from East Africa. According to the United Nations and the International Organization for Migration sources from the region, thousands of Africans continue to seek […]
U.S. – Russia political interactions often resemble a swinging pendulum that goes from hardly negotiated consensus to deepening disagreement and swooping across to ‘tit for tat‘ tactics. The Recent Russian response to U.S. ‘Magnitsky list’ is a good example of that. The story began with the accidental death of Sergey Magnitsky, a 37-year old […]
So the big news out of South Africa today is that Julius Malema, firebrand president of the ANC Youth League and general lightning rod for controversy has been suspended (or forced to “vacate his position”) for five years from the ANC. And for good measure the party also ousted the Youth League’s “arrogant” spokesman, Floyd […]
Posting has been light on my part because I have been in an almost constant state of travel of late. My apologies. And that travel continues tomorrow when I begin a trip that will ultimately take me to the Sport and the Global South conference to be held next Tuesday and Wednesday (November 15th and […]
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has indicated that Japan will participate in U.S.-backed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade talks at the APEC summit next weekend in Hawaii. This has triggered emotional responses in both the U.S. and Japan, especially from farmers in Japan, and lawmakers in the U.S. Japan hasn’t been self-sufficient in food since 1920. Japan […]
Russia. It’s not all doom and gloom (we’re not Greece, you know!). Sure, in their latest dispatches from Vladivostok and Lake Baikal, the BBC’s Reggie Nadelson and the Atlantic’s Nicholas Schmidle didn’t ask the hard questions. Like, where’s all that money earmarked for preparing for the APEC Summit really going? Or, what about the Baikal […]
Accompanied by wife Rosalynn, US Ambassador to Haiti Kenneth Merten and Haiti’s Public Health Minister Florence Duperval Guillaune, Former US President Jimmy Carter launched National Initiative to Eliminate Filariasis on Sunday Nov. 7, 2011, a massive $1.5 million medication distribution campaign to help eradicate Lymphatic Filariasis in Haiti. Also known as elephantiasis, lymphatic Filariasis infected […]
Almost immediately following the release of Gilad Shalit rocket attacks on Israel from Gaza resumed. Over the last couple of weeks, it has begun to feel like a major scuffle between Israel, Hamas, and the Islamic Jihad is on the horizon. Sunday night at the Jewish General Assembly in Denver, Colorado, I had the opportunity […]
On October 20, President Barack Obama and Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg met at the White House in Washington, D.C. They discussed issues such as Norway’s involvement in the campaigns in Libya and Afghanistan, and the domestic terrorist attacks in July. One other issue they also discussed was the High North. In their joint remarks […]
As in other countries swept up by the “Arab Spring” movement which was initially born in Tunisia following the immolation of Mohamed Bou’azizi, a simple fruit seller driven to despair by the repressive and corrupt Tunisian regime; the Media has been playing an important role in the coverage of Yemen’s very own uprising. Used by […]