President Barack Obama is due to announce his plan to start pulling U.S troops out of Afghanistan during a televised speech to his American and international audience, his sixth since assuming office in January 2009. This rather militarily dicey and politically expedient move is being made right in the midst of wholesale national security changes in […]
Last week the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a regional security body with a total population of 1.5 billion people, held a 10th anniversary summit in the capital of Kazakhstan, Astana. The original “Shanghai Five” was formed in 1996 comprised of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. In 2001 when Uzbekistan joined the pack, it became […]
The latest Pew Research Center public opinion poll shows that the Pakistani people continue to hold the U.S in astonishingly low regard. However, one sliver of good news, for American interests, is that since the May 2nd Navy Seal operation that captured and killed Osama bin Laden, U.S support in Pakistan has not fallen further: […]
Despite my day job and this Foreign Policy Association endeavor writing on Cuba, sometimes I do not fully appreciate how challenging it actually can be for Americans to gain U.S. government approval to visit the island. Like so many things, one can talk about this issue every day in a broad sense and in so […]
It is a dangerous time to be a fishing trawler in the South China Sea these days. Earlier this month, a Vietnamese vessel searching for oil had a rather unpleasant confrontation with a Chinese fishing boat, resulting in damage to the Vietnamese’s seismic equipment used for exploration purposes. Moreover, just this past week, the administration […]
The death of Andrei Sakharov’s widow, fellow human rights activist Yelena Bonner, over the weekend brought out the usual opportunists. In Russia, right wing liberals like Boris Nemtsov immediately swooped down to claim her mantle: “The demise of such a Soviet dissident as Yelena Bonner is a huge loss for our society, which is badly […]
Iraqi lawmakers are demanding the return of $17 billion they say was stolen during the second Iraq war.
The premise of the whole Greek bailout exercise has rested on its economy improving. So far, it has not: Since the country’s first bailout last spring, unemployment has risen sharply and GDP ground to a halt. So after a year of bailout roulette, the head of Pimco, the world’s largest bond fund, said Sunday what […]
As it stands today, Israel’s government is a system of extreme proportional representation. There is hardly an ethnic minority or political group lacking representation. While at face value this may seem to be the fairest system, it is in fact a deeply flawed way of governance. The way it works is the public votes for […]
More than 52.6 million* domestic workers across the world, including South Asians employed in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region, are set to get more protection through a landmark treaty. Adopted on June 16, 2011 by the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the ILO Convention on Decent Work for Domestic Workers would ensure domestic workers enjoyed […]
Reports are swirling that nearly $ 7 billion of Iraq’s oil money, siphoned into the country to rebuild critical infrastructure, may have simply been lifted by some enterprising crooks
The U.S. voiced discontent with the Japanese government through official channels last month over Japan’s postponement on a decision to join a U.S.-led Pacific free trade accord. Tokyo was to arrive at a decision by June, but postponed it in the wake of the March 11 earthquake. Washington is understandably frustrated with Tokyo’s delaying a […]
I recently watched the famous Russian director Alexei Balabanov’s 2007 movie Cargo 200 (or Gruz 200 in Russian). This blog entry is an attempt to explore and uncover the director’s message behind his artistic choice of making a visually, morally and emotionally poignant – if not shockingly grotesque – movie about the mid-80s in the […]
At The Mail & Guardian Percy Zvomuya has a piece recalling last year’s World Cup, which, as he aptly says, “A year later, the Fifa World Cup seems like it was hosted decades ago.” And yet many of his best memories are akin to mine: We witnessed a spontaneous outburst of passion: cars draped in […]
From the days of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics to the boycotts of 1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles Olympics by the ‘NATO aligned’ and the ‘Warsaw Pact nations’ respectively, whenever sport has got affected, it has more or less indicated of a conflict larger than that confined to the […]