You have to be mad to oppose Putin. At least that is what a Moscow court ruled on Tuesday when it sentenced Mikhail Kosenko to be committed to a psychiatric hospital for his part in the anti-government protest. “The court has ruled to release Kosenko Mikhail Alexandrovich from criminal responsibility for insanely conducting actions forbidden […]
As many people are now aware, the Syrian insurgency is a diverse and fractionated operation. Including all the minor, local militias, there are an estimated 1,200 rebel organizations playing some role in it. Western observers tend to divide them into pro-Western and Islamist, but this is a simplification. The independent-minded groups have many shades of […]
How to Keep Somalia’s “Lost Boys” Problem From Becoming Our Own “Christian American B*stard, go home!” was the insult hurled at me by a sandal-wearing, skinny and feisty 14-year-old Somali boy on a sultry day in Somalia in 1993. The boy’s name was Maxamed, and I was a 22-year-old U.S. Marine on the first of […]
The latest row between the U.S. and its main rival in Latin America recently took a turn for the worse when three U.S. diplomats were expelled from Venezuela. The allegations were that these three diplomats were aiding in the sabotage of Venezuela’s power grid tied in with other sensational accusations. In response, the U.S. expelled […]
“It’s so far, but so very near to us now.” This is what Dr. Uttam Kumar Sinha observed during the opening of the AsiArctic conference at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA) in New Delhi, India last week. India received observer status in the Arctic Council in May of this year, along with […]
As a Pakistani, I know that we are some of the most resilient people with the biggest hearts and the most gullible minds. Since time immemorial, Pakistani’s have been has been held hostage to their long desire to have a country that is run by the equitable laws of God. Since its inception, politicians and […]
The West is currently fighting a new type of political disease: the tyranny of the minority. This tyranny is a direct threat to the democratic system of the US, France and other European countries. In the US, the Tea Party is hurting an entire country; while in Europe, the extreme right in France, Italy, Britain, […]
This week marks the celebration of a “Golden Week” of public holidays in China, during which millions of Chinese people take vacations, many of which will be abroad. Prior to this holiday week, which officially began on October 1, China’s National Tourism Administration publicized a 64-page guidebook on their website, entitled “Guidebook for Civilized Tourism,” […]
Below is an article by Roger Cohen in the New York Times, which favorably references an op-ed by David Harris, the head of the American Jewish Committee. Cohen means to demonstrate that even Harris thinks that Netanyahu “blustered” too much about Iran in his speech before the United Nations General Assembly this week. (Incidentally, he […]
If you thought Washington’s ongoing political dysfunction was unrivaled, think again. There are any number of running political stalemates on the European side of the Atlantic. They don’t get the attention that the impasse in Washington has recently garnered, but one in particular, in Bosnia-Herzogovina, may be just as intractable as the no-holds-barred struggle between […]
Credit: Wikimedia Commons An Arabic-language professor at San Diego State University (SDSU) recently handed out an interesting map of the Arabic-speaking world to students on the second day of class. In it, the territory that makes up the state of Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza Strip was labeled simply as “Palestine.” This provoked several […]
As President Obama clashes with Congress over spending authorizations and debt ceilings to keep funds flowing outward from the U.S. government, his counterpart in Moscow is celebrating a victory that has brought lawmakers’ own money flowing back into Russia. Six weeks ago, just as Washington’s budget battles began heating up yet again, Russian lawmakers […]
The shale gas debate rages on across Europe, Asia, and North America, but one ponders how the already resource rich Southern Africa fits into this equation. What is there, what is the potential and what could it mean from an economic and geopolitical standpoint? One country already known to possess great potential that can be […]
Five years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, its reverberations are still being felt throughout the world. GDP in many wealthy countries remains well below its pre-crisis peak, and in Europe the global financial crisis has morphed into the Euro crisis. The downturn has been most pronounced along Europe’s southern coast, as countries wrestle with […]
White House press secretary Jay Carney offered a sharp rebuttal of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s op-ed in The New York Times recently by saying, “unlike Russia, the United States stands up for democratic values and human rights around the world.” History paints a somewhat different story. In contrast to President Barack Obama’s contention that the […]