China said it will seek a higher “quality and efficiency” of growth next year, signaling new leaders may accept a reduced pace of expansion in exchange for a more sustainable model. There was no mention of seeking “relatively fast” growth, a policy in place since 2006, in a report yesterday by the state-run Xinhua News […]
A FORMER prime minister, who resigned in 2007 after a shambolic first year in office, and his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), which two years later was hounded out of the governing role that it had taken as its birthright, are both headed for a remarkable return to power. In the hours after midnight it became […]
A casual observer of the Arab world will most likely have concluded that the experiment in adapting political Islam to democracy has already failed. Almost two years ago, as the Arab revolutions began in Tunisia, it seemed a foregone conclusion that political pluralism on a western model would take the place of the ageing autocrats […]
To say that corruption is endemic across Pakistan is neither new nor an understatement. But last week, a statement by President Asif Ali Zardari’s handpicked head of the main anti-corruption body stunned even those Pakistanis who have become relatively immune to graft. According to an estimate by the so-called National Accountability Bureau (NAB), led by […]
Facebook wasted no time acting with impunity by (once again) diluting member privacy protections this week. But it needn’t have hurried. Any semblance of democracy was washed away at noon Pacific Time Tuesday, when a vote to have votes on policy changes went down in flames. It solidified the world’s largest social network’s rule by fiat. […]
On the small, spectacular island of Jeju, off the southern tip of Korea, indigenous villagers have been putting their bodies in the way of construction of a joint South Korean–US naval base that would be an environmental, cultural and political disaster. If completed, the base would hold more than 7,000 navy personnel, plus twenty warships […]
Last winter, a wave of mass demonstrations suddenly broke the surface calm of Russian politics. A new middle class, born of the oil-based prosperity of the last decade, took to the streets to voice its opposition to the perceived corruption of the political elite, especially United Russia, the ruling party of then Prime Minister Vladimir […]
BANGLADESH suffered a violent birth. In the last days of 1971 the country then called East Pakistan was engulfed by torture, rape, mass-killing and other acts of genocide. The main perpetrators were Pakistani troops bent on preventing secession from “West Pakistan”. But the army had the support of many of East Pakistan’s fundamentalist groups, including […]
Egyptians will vote today in a referendum on a new constitution that has polarized the country, with opposition groups urging the rejection of a charter they say lays the ground for Islamist dominance. Cairo, Alexandria and eight other governorates will vote today, with polling stations opening at 8 a.m. local time. The rest of the […]
The World Conference on International Telecommunication (WCIT) that concluded on December 14 saw much heated debate. Some countries wanted to use the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) to gain intergovernmental control of the World Wide Web. Some saw it as an opportunity to democratise the Internet, by replacing U.S. and corporate domination of Internet policy, with […]
