Beginning on Thursday, May 26, Canada’s Carleton University will host a conference on cooperation in the Arctic between three of the region’s five littoral states: Canada, Norway, and Russia. High-ranking officials from each country will be in attendance, including the Russian Ambassador to Canada, Georgiy Enverovich MAMEDOV, the Norwegian Deputy Foreign Minister, Espen Barthe Eide, […]
Protest rallies in Georgia, begun over the weekend in Tbilisi and Batumi, seem to be headed for violent confrontation today (Wednesday afternoon in the US, early Thursday morning in Tbilisi) after apparently failing to achieve the goals of their organizers or to attract widespread public support. It’s not that the latest opposition movement (called the […]
“This conference cannot close without adopting a single African Charter. We cannot leave here without having created a single African organization…. If we fail in this, we will have shirked our responsibility to Africa and to the peoples we lead.” So said Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie at a Pan-African summit in 1963 at which the […]
In what was one of his longest speeches to date, last Friday Mexican President Felipe Calderón gave a resounding defense of his administration’s battle against organized crime and sought to compare critics of his governments’ security policies to those who doubted of Churchill’s resolve in confronting the Nazis. Calderón went on extend the comparison between […]
As the architects of the Iraq war remain holed up in this last bastion of neo-conservatism, AEI’s continued influence and Gates’ congruence to their guidance may come as a surprise to many, in an era of hope and change
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 […]
The last few days have been very dramatic, as far as American/Israeli relations are concerned. I am not going to spell out everything that has been happening in the wake of the AIPAC conference that took place this past weekend in Washington, DC. One need not look further than earlier posts on this blog to […]
he Following piece is written by a Yemeni-based journalist who writes for the Foreign Policy Blogs network and, due to serious security concerns, remains anonymous. YEMEN SANA’A- Only a day after the Opposition inked the GCC proposal which was meant to pave the way to a peaceful transition of power, President Saleh suggested that he […]
The Following piece is written by a Yemeni-based journalist who writes for the Foreign Policy Blogs network and, due to serious security concerns, remains anonymous. While anti-government protesters continue to demand the immediate departure of their long standing and much hated President; Yemen is now facing an imminent multi facets crisis which ripples, will be […]
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 […]
Agustin Carstens, Mexico’s central bank chief and possibly Michael Moore’s long lost brother, is the first official nominee for the post held until last week by Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Since its inception in 1945, the IMF has had a European as its head (America got dibs on the World Bank spot). Now the EU governments are […]
All Americans, nay, all English speakers should read this blog. It appears that the English language has changed nearly overnight because the same comments by President Barack Obama on Sunday garnered a substantially different reaction than those nearly identical remarks on Thursday. Either the English language morphed over the weekend, or Obama critics simply weren’t […]
In the highest ever voter turnout, South Africans firmly put the governing African National Congress in charge of the nation’s municipalities, taking 61.95%) of the vote nationally. Did the delivery of basic services like water, housing and jobs influence the way people voted on Wednesday May 18, 2011? Of course it is difficult to tell, […]
While surfing the Web the other day researching Japanese demographics, I found this government Web page. The page says, “To revive the title ‘Japan — The safest country in the world’, Immigration Bureau aims to reduce the number of illegal stay foreigner to the half the number of 2004 until 2008 and in order to […]
The Asia Society last week released what it calls a unique sixty-one page report Pakistan 2020: A vision for Building a Better Future in New York and Washington DC. The report has endeavored to look at Pakistan from multiple lenses rather than solely focusing on the country’s security issues. A team of around thirty American […]