As I type South Africa is running down England in their World Cup Cricket Super Eight match. This is the game I have been waiting for since the Super Eight fixtures were announced, and as the weeks have passed it grew more and more clear that the South Africa-England competition would be huge and probably […]
Mexican soldiers have detained over 100 police officers in Nuevo Leon, a state bordering Texas. They are being held and investigated on suspicion of aiding drug traffickers in what appears to be the latest effort of President Calderon's administration to dispatch the military in fighting drug cartels. For further information, see: Soldiers arrest Mexican police […]
Currently, Turkmenistan's President Berdymukhammedov is visiting Saudi Arabia to arrange for oil and gas cooperation. Before that, he entertained OSCE representatives who proposed aid in environmental, educational, political and economic venues. More diplomatic envoys over gas exports but little else about Turkmenistan whatsoever: President Berdymukhammedov has said that long-term gas export agreements with China, Russia, and Iran […]
A recent article in Perspectives on Politics discusses the study of ethnic, religious, national, and other kinds of collective identity. Specifically, Abdelal, et al note that political scientists use words like "ethnicity", "religious group", and "national identity" without regard to analytic rigor. They present six different methods to ascertain group affiliation and bring scholarship back to earth. Nevertheless, I found myself […]
As of Friday, April the 13th, Human Rights Watch cannot remain in Uzbekistan, because its director has “exceeded her authority” and “worked outside the charter”. The new permitting regime was tightened after the Andijan Massacre. Many NGOs, press organizations, businesses, and military personnel have been asked to leave. Throwing the foreign rascals out, by date: June 6, […]
Kazakhstan-India trade turnover has gone from USD 120 to 210 million–a 74% increase, from last year to the year before. Kazakhstan is working hard to develop further bilateral trade ties with India. Though such trade naturally includes petroleum market trade, Kazakhstan is developing an attractive trade diplomacy for other industries, including special economic zones (SEZs) […]
Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helu has surpassed Warren Buffet to take the number two position on the Forbes list of the world's richest people. Slim, now worth $53 billion, is approaching Bill Gates’ fortune of $56 for the top spot. Slim owns Mexico's dominant phone company and has numerous other holdings throughout Latin America. His wealth highlights the gap between […]
Right now, with Kyrgyzstan's leadership shuffle and constitutional conflicts, we have few resources so excellent as the blogs written in Kyrgyzstan itself. Mirsulzhan Namaliev is what you might call “plugged in” to events and politics in Kyrgyzstan. According to Tolkun, he is currently out there in Bishkek's square covering the demonstrations. Tolkun's most recent post in […]
After a week of writing on environmental disaster, I thought it might be fun to consider a global environmental event that doesn't impinge upon anyone's social conscience: the long-ago ages of the dinosaurs. On March 24, 2007, LiveScience reported the finding of two new species of dinosaurs in Mongolia. One species ranks "as one of […]
A couple of weeks back I wrote about controversy over the renaming of the South African town of Louis Trichardt. It seemed obvious to me that a country that had so long seen the majority population trampled under the foot of the white minority ought to have the fairly fundamental right to reclaim the naming […]
As noted in part 1 of this series, the Aral Sea is the endpoint of an exotic watershed, with water-rich areas upstream and an arid downstream. Throughout the world, exotic watersheds are usually more heavily populated downstream. In general, international law gives downstream human security priority over upstream ownership‚ in other words, people have a […]
The U.S. Department of State issued a new report April 5, called “Supporting Human Rights and Democracy: The U.S. Record.” Unlike the Congressionally-mandated annual report on human rights, this one goes to Congress with a focus upon democracy promotion. RFE/RL has an interview with Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor Erica Barks-Ruggles (wonder […]
Over at the Council on Foreign relations website Francis Kornegay, a senior researcher at the Center for Policy Studies in Johannesburg, and Tom Wheeler, a research fellow at the South African Institute of International Affairs, discuss whether South Africa is living up to its responsibility as Africa's leader in an edifying exchange. Meanwhile other observers […]
One of the biggest problems that African policymakers face is the risk of being reduced to one or two usually failing policies. The majority of Americans pay Africa virtually no heed as it is, and so complexity gets lost in favor of simple, and thus simplistic, renderings of African leaders. Ask even educated Americans (or, […]
Until writing these posts, I visualized desertification as an encroaching edge. Climate research shows, though, that desertification works on a pocket approach: a little desert here, and a little desert there, like brush fires, gradually grow into one very large swathe of hostile landmass. This pocket-to-pocket desertification is occurring in the Gobi Deserts of Mongolia […]