This might have passed you by; certainly it did me. There’s no surprise here, nothing really worth accounting for; but I’ll go ahead and account for it anyway. Jamaat has come out to say that during the troubles in 1971, the people who constituted both the party, Jamaat-e-Islami and the paramilitary killer brigade, were all […]
It was like just another formality in the Sino-Indian relationship being fulfilled, as the Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao concluded his “significant” “trust-building” India visit on Friday. The Chinese Premier brought along a huge entourage of 400 business leaders to India, signaling the only purpose of his visit – more business. India and China signed […]
Today’s PBS Newshour coverage of President Obama’s Af/Pak review canvassed everything you need to know about how Pakistan and politics there feeds into the administration’s strategy to pull together a feasible exit from Afghanistan beginning July 2011. Here’s the video of the Newshour’s segment on the policy review released earlier today, December 16, 2010: Please […]
They say that anywhere you dig in Israel, you find history. It appears that rings true once more. A crumbling sea-side cliff outside the city of Ashkelon revealed an ancient Roman statute. The land area known today as Israel has been home to some of the world’s greatest civilizations, including the ancient Jews, the Romans, […]
Pomp and ceremony will come and go and there’s yet plenty of time to crow about vainglorious victory; but before the day passes irretrievably I’d like to wish my fellow native Bangladeshis a happy Victory Day. May all our days, yours and mine, be driven toward a better future, with more than a passing glance […]
Travelers to our nation’s capital from Israel might feel a little more at home in the coming days, as Metro (the subway system) administrators are preparing to implement a new program that includes random bag checks when passengers enter a station. In Israel, security guards outside malls, office buildings, stores and restaurants search bags of […]
On Thursday, Canada’s National Energy Board will make a decision on whether to green-light the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. Plans for the pipeline have been up in the air since the 1970s, alternately buoyed and sunk for many reasons, one of them being changes in natural gas prices. It is estimated that natural gas futures should […]
In a relatively short period of time since Ghana discovered oil off its coast the country has developed the capacity to drill and extract that oil, a process that reached fruition on Wednesday. Now the question is: Can Ghana avoid the so-called “oil curse” that has enveloped too many West African countries when black gold […]
The election stalemate in the Ivory Coast continues with no clear end in sight. The European Union is planning sanctions to provide pressure on Laurent Gbagbo to yield to Alassane Ouattara, the nearly universally agreed upon winner of last month’s vote. If sanctions are a clear sign that the outside world has no idea what […]
Whether you call it “dangling lucrative incentives,” or outright vote-buying, it seems likely that Silvio Berlusconi was able to heavily influence the successful outcome of Tuesday’s censure poll that allowed him to avoid calling new elections and imperil his administration. But one could argue that he truly owes whatever remains of his career to his […]
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has come to help Bangladesh’s economy grow in the short to medium term, even as donor countries have begun to the belt on their fiscal and monetary policy. In consultation with the Finance Minster, the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisor, Bangladesh Bank and other major institutional stake-holders, the IMF has proposed […]
Hat-tip to Frédéric LeMaître for reminding me of this: Maybe the biggest opponent of the apocalyptic, Thomas Mann-induced vision of a German Europe that Alphaville has been fearing and which I invoked in a recent post, might actually be Germany itself. Ulrike Guérot from ECFR has put forward an argument recently that Germany were in […]
The U.S. Department of State regularly updates its country notes and send out the changes via email. Those country notes are worth perusing, as they provide a quick snapshot into countries’ cultures, economies, and political systems. The State Department just updated their Israel notes and they can be found here. The bulk of the notes […]
The Israeli clandestine service, the Mossad, has been criticized of late for some perceived setbacks. For example, the hit on a Hamas-affiliated terrorist in the Gulf was widely attributed to Israel because some of the assassins were videotaped and their passports were identified. In the Mossad’s past strikes, the clandestine agency left no traces, therefore […]
The news of Richard Holbrooke’s sudden death engulfed diplomatic circles in Washington with an ineffable sorrow. His condition was reported critical but stabilizing a day earlier, as his doctors hoped for a slow recovery after a lengthy surgery to repair a tear in his aorta. But 69 year old Richard Holbrooke could not survive. Holbrooke, whose forceful style […]