The Mail & Guardian has a feature on Kader Asmal, who is leaving politics to take on a post at the University of the Western Cape in Bellville. Asmal's peripatetic career in opposition to the Apartheid state and in support of democracy took him to Bellville in 1994, where he lectured at UWC after he […]
Not everyone shares the general belief that president Bush deserves some credit for his Africa policies. Josh Kurlantznick is decidedly unimpressed with the President's approach toward Africa, as he shows in this piece at The New Republic. Here is a sample: Rather than supporting democratic institutions and criticizing a new generation of African authoritarians, the […]
A New York Times article yesterday takes a look at the Kazakh bid for an Oscar last night for “Mongol,” one of a number of films being produced in the country following the flow of funds from oil and natural gas windfalls. While “Mongol” lost out to the Austrian produced film “The Counterfeiters,” the nationalistic […]
A Wall Street Journal op-ed takes a look at some of the problems facing those responsible for managing Mexico's nasty drug war, and the new “realist” attitude adopted by the country's new Attorney General, Eduardo Medina Mora. Mary Anastasia O’Grady explains a new approach that Mora says seeks to curb the “enormous economic and fire […]
The Yuan is still up while the USD continues to lower in value. What does this mean for China? According to this article, huge losses (Billions) for the People's Bank of China. China's surplus situation is forcing the country to sell its RMB to buy dollar assets, and then turn around to buy back its […]
My apologies for the light posting this week. I’ve been down and out with a nasty case of the flu for the last few days. Things will pick back up as I recover from my current zombie status. In the meantime, you should read this piece on President Bush's trip to Africa by the Foreign […]
Iraqi security officials have been ordered to round up homeless people, beggars, and vagrants in effort at preventive counter terrorism. This is a result of the suicide bombings several weeks ago which were supposedly carried out by two women with Down's Syndrome, but recent statements made by US and Iraqi forces indicate that this was […]
Vali Nasr, one of the world's leading experts on Shi’ism, and Ray Takeyh, author of the excellent Hidden Iran, have co-authored a piece in the latest Foreign Affairs about the dangers of Washington's Iran containment strategy. This is a grand strategy, which basically involves rallying all the Sunni Arab states against the growing Persian threat, […]
So there is going to be a total eclipse of the moon tonight, which is pretty cool, even if you are not into astronomy. Light bending around the earth coats the moon in an dark red glow; we bathe it with our shadow- just one of the bizarre tricks the universe can play on us. […]
The Egyptian National soccer team has won the Africa Cup of Nations, beating Cameroon 1-0 in the finals in Ghana. Cameroon captured the continent during its stirring 2004 World Cup run (your humble writer watched the game in a bar in Tanzania, and the crowd was going nuts), but now Egypt has won. It is […]
The Council on Foreign Relations has a useful primer on American policies toward the five countries President Bush is visiting this week. I am going to make a controversial assertion: Although President Bush has, by just about any measure, been a pretty bad president, he ranks among the upper echelons in terms of policy toward […]
Imad Mugnieh, mastermind of the 1983 attacks on American soldiers in Beirut, as well as a host of other Hezbollah atrocities, died when his car exploded last week- surely the closest he has ever had the chance to see one of his own hallmarks. The immediate suspects were, of course, Israel and the US. I […]
Periodically you’ll hear the whispering: FIFA is displeased with South Africa's progress in preparing to host the World Cup in 2010. Every sign of “political instability” (which is a patronizing way of referring to political division, which every vibrant democracy has) or possible internal conflicts in the organizing effort sends the FIFA overlords and Afro-pessimists […]
The pause in troops that has been touted by General Petraeus and Secretary Gates as necessary to judge and consolidate security gains from the surge has been universally panned by Democrats. The reasoning behind the ‘pause’ (Pause: it's pop culture's new 'surge’, I can just feel it) is that “We have momentum, and we must […]
The Economist this past week had a correspondent keeping a diary based on experiences in Kenya. The week's entries are, by definition, episodic, but provide some context for daily life amidst the political and social chaos that has emerged.