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 […]
Philip Gourevitch has a fine piece in the latest New Yorker about the plight of Zimbabwe. There is not a lot that will be new to readers of this blog, but it provides a nice summary of Mugabe's treachery and South Africa's laissez faire response.
A UPI report announcing the potential formation of a new world gas cartel has political and economic implications for Central Asia: High oil prices have lent Putin's Russia an apparent power in the world market, and fears of a new Russia-led gas cartel have been fanned over the past year. A meeting in Doha, Qatar between Russian, Venezuelan, Iranian, and other […]
100-plus years of accelerating irrigation, destruction Though the Environmental Justice Project blames the Aral Sea disaster upon Karimov's regime, this is not strictly correct (or even useful). The Aral Sea disaster is a mostly ignored but challenging legacy to Central Asia's leadership as a whole. Uzbekistan is the prime violator of sustainable water regimes, but Karimov […]
In some ways these ought to be salad days for Thabo Mbeki and South Africa. The country's continued growth rate has been in the black for something like one hundred straight months, a claim that few countries in the world can stake. South Africa, already arguably Africa's hottest tourist destination, is poised to show the […]
Contributed by Rich Basas of FPA's Migration Blog: In Mexico's "Dirty War" between 1968 and 1971, more than 600 people were "disappeared" for their political convictions. While much progress has been made with disappeared people in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay since the 1970s and the fall of military dictatorships in those countries, there has not […]
Last week, April 2-5, EU representatives visited Uzbekistan to discuss sanctions after a cool meeting on March 28. Uzbekistan's Minister of Foreign Relations said that Uzbekistan would not be lectured to, nor would it countenance any interference in its domestic affairs. Despite these strong words, the EU's Ferrero-Waldner has said that Uzbekistan is “re-thinking” its […]