The White House Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release February 27, 2011 Statement by National Security Council Spokesman Tommy Vietor on Iran The United States strongly condemns the Iranian government’s organized intimidation campaign and arrests of political figures, human rights defenders, political activists, student leaders, journalists and bloggers. The Iranian government also continues […]
Defense Minister of Afghanistan Abdul Rahim Wardak had an hour long conversation with noted interviewer Charlie Rose this past Friday evening. The conversation touched on everything that you might want to know about Afghanistan; how the Karzai administration intends to go work with President Obama impending draw down; what the interested reader and analyst concerned […]
The Israelis and the Palestinians often interact like a crotchety elderly couple, sniping at one another and dismissing their shared future. The New Yorker has another spin on this relationship in a rather good editorial cartoon:
Has former Armenian president Levon Ter-Petrossian been personally profiting from the Iranian narcotics trade? This is the conclusion that some people are drawing from a Wikileaks release on the Norwegian news site Aftenposten. The cable can be viewed here, and the story has gotten circulation on Armenian web sites, including PanArmenian.net, whose editors wrote the […]
Moments after seeing TV images of Vladimir Putin professing a liking for a then poorly rated white leopard as the Sochi Winter Olympics mascot, which was being chosen through a nationwide poll, my dad said: “Mark my words: that will be the one”. Funny how a lifetime spent living in Russia can develop one’s clairvoyance! […]
Laurent Gbagbo’s intransigence has quickly gone from the noisome to the deadly to the potentially catastrophic. There are all kinds of signs that Gbagbo has decided “je suis l’etat,” and as a result with each passing day the likelihood of civil war — something with which the mass of Ivorians are all too familiar — […]
NYU’s Center for Global Affairs and the Quebec Government Office in New York City will be co-hosting a panel tomorrow, Monday, February 28 at 6:30 pm entitled, “Going North: The Geopolitics of Northern Development.” The main topic of discussion will be how resource and shipping developments in the Arctic are affecting geopolitics in the region. […]
Not yet confirmed, but inside sources tell me that mass action days are planned for Zimbabwe (1st or 21st March), Angola (7th March), and Swaziland (1st April). No surprise there! Why? The three countries share something in common: 1. Zimbabwe: Dictatorship, human rights abuses, worse economic condition, and high unemployment rate). 2. Angola: (state-sponsored corruption, […]
Uzbekistan is systematically sneaking electricity from Kazakhstan’s power grid beyond amounts agreed between the two parties, the Kazakhstan Electricity Grid Operating Company (KEGOC) claims. Kazakhstan has had tensions with Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan off and on for the last ten years on electricity. Basically, there isn’t enough electricity for the latter two states during the winter. […]
With the current crises and revolutions in North Africa, Maghreb and Middle East, the political crisis taking place in Wisconsin has flown under the radar in Europe. Wisconsin is going through a major political and social crisis as the future of labor unions’ power and other social rights of public workers in Wisconsin and ultimately […]
Is the U.S. scaling back its military and political ambitions before the start of the July 2011 drawdown? The New York Times reported that the U.S military is withdrawing from its outpost in the Pech Valley, a post that it had previously thought crucial in its strategy to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda. So, […]
By now, everyone monitoring the developments in the Middle East can’t help but liken them to dominos: once the first dictatorship fell (in Tunisia), the rest were just a matter of time. Of course societies do not behave like toys – what is common among the revolting populations of the Middle East is that they […]
A History of Inner Asia by Svat Soucek is a scholarly work about the history of Inner Asia which includes the present day five independent states of Central Asia (in historic terms also known collectively as Russian or Western Turkestan), Mongolia (Outer Mongolia) and China controlled Sinkiang (Eastern or Chinese Turkestan). It is not customary […]
Forty-five activists of Zimbabwe’s International Socialist Organization have been charged with treason for discussing political events in Egypt and other Arab countries. “Zimbabwean prosecutors say socialist Munyaradzi Gwisai and 44 members of his organization watched videos of events in the Mideast and conspired to overthrow President Robert Mugabe and the government,” reports VOA. With the […]
How can one country that is often ignored by the world community have such an effect on all of us, even more than Egypt in some ways? Libya has often been under the radar over the last 70 years except for the battle between the Allies and Afrika Corps during the Second World War and […]