As Russia replayed its glorious WWII past in Red Square, a darker history repeated itself just miles away. “The Russian Prime Minister has called for tougher safety measures after one of the country’s worst mine accidents in a generation” reads the lead paragraph of a BBC article entitled “Russia’s Mine Safety Woes. The article appears […]
Today is Victory Day. I remember eating dinner at my grandparents’ austere Voronezh apartment as a kid with real silver silverwave, butter knives with hollow bulbous handles and faded ornate monograms featuring a giant, unslavic letter: W. It was ‘trophy’ silver my grandfather brought back from Berlin 65 years ago. A long time, but not […]
Below you will find a topographic map of Afghanistan and its neighbors. The dense colors of the map showcase the high elevation and dry climate of the country and contrast greatly with southeastern Pakistan. Check out the full size of this map and others at www.afghan-web.com.
When President Obama announced that he was sending an additional 30,000 American troops to work under Gen. McChrystal’s leadership in Afghanistan, his very next sentence stated that US forces would be starting a withdrawal 18 months later on July 2011. I was critical of this at the time and still am. The US and the […]
The way journalism is treated in today’s Russia, perhaps it is not surprising that one of its greatest practitioners continues to linger in obscurity decades after his death. Yet The Guardian’s Luke Harding sees the hand of a new Stalinism behind the contemporary unpopularity of Vasily Grossman, the legendary war reporter and novelist whose Tolstoian […]
Russian journalists are used to being kicked when they’re down. But new proposed legislation could go much further by basically branding the country’s already curbed, cowed and embattled reporters accessories to terrorists. According to the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers, The proposal, which was presented to the country’s lower parliament, the State Duma, […]
Looks like Hugo Chavez’s fabled sense of smell has finally deserted him. How else to explain the Venezuelan leader’s puzzling decision to take lessons in socialist town planning from Moscow mayor Yuri Luzhkov. True, Luzhkov can boast of his victorious controversial Gen Plan, a 15 year development blueprint for Moscow, which was passed today (using […]
A soldier’s life should include some down time where he/she can let loose. Well, some American servicemen in Farah province showed that they would use their down time to ‘get down’. Check out this video of these eight tough soldiers performing Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’:
The always provocative Ahmed Rashid has another worthwhile column in the Washington Post about the US and Karzai government negotiating with the Taliban that tangentially brought up an interesting issue: How would American voters react to American talks with the Taliban? This is obviously an important factor as there will inevitably be some form of […]
All is not lost in Russia. Though deprived of meaningful political democracy, its citizens can still vote with their wallets and cinema tickets. And their hearty rejection of “Burnt by the Sun 2”, Russia’s most expensive movie showed more than mere disgust at the laughably bad WWII ‘epic’ or the bloated vanity of its sycophant […]
Manasi Kulkarni (Kakatkar) has a very informative piece on FPA’s India blog about India’s growing role in Afghanistan. Here is a piece: The meeting between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Obama on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit last week, seems to have produced positive results for India. The US ambassador to India, […]
They were born and live in a small, prosperous and democratic country. Yet that country refuses to give them citizenship rights because they happen to share an ethnicity with its large and authoritarian Eastern neighbour, which has invaded it in the past. Aggrieved at such discrimination, they see their cries fall on deaf ears among […]
With their tweedy manner, fancy degrees, thousand paged books and tenured positions, it was all too easy to forget that Russia historians are really just backstabbing, gossipy teenage egomaniacs at heart. Until now. It all started when a few Russia scholars, including Robert Service, noticed some mean reader reviews for their books on Amazon. They […]
Afghanistan is becoming a grave yard. Innocent people including women and children are losing their lives in every corner of the country. Sometimes they are shields to Taliban to fight with NATO and sometimes they are killed by NATO, mistaken for Taliban. People are losing hope. They do not trust foreign troops any more. In […]
In honor of the momentous events occurring in nearby Kyrgyzstan, this weeks Afghan-related map will be of the regional variety. It is an ethnicity map of Central Asia. Click on the previous link or the map to get a larger version. The map’s legend is in French, but can still be followed. Here’s a great […]