From space, the idea of a global water crisis may seem perplexing: 75 percent of the planet’s surface is blue. But usable fresh water is a tiny fraction of what we see – only 2.5 percent of the water on Earth. And two-thirds of that fresh water is locked away in glaciers, icecaps, and permanent […]
There are many challenging numbers confronting China‘s new leaders, but two are especially stark. China has 20 per cent of the world’s population, but only nine per cent of the world’s farmland. And even that imbalance in the amount of land available to produce food for an increasingly demanding population of 1.3 billion is getting worse […]
Many years ago, Pakistan analyst Khaled Ahmed identified some nations as not having a foreign policy. Export-oriented economies, according to his thesis, chose not to have a clearly defined foreign policy. On issues of controversy, they lay low rather than commit to a side. Ahmed named Singapore and South Korea as his examples. For them, […]
There’s been much discussion over British aid to booming India, but in the 19th Century a village in southern England was saved by aid coming the other way. It was the mid-1800s in southeast England, and a little boy was being beaten by his mother for drinking the last of the water in their house during […]
IT IS an epic story of warring factions in a strange and changing landscape, a tale of incursions and sieges, of plots and betrayals, of battlefield brilliance and of cunning with coin. The sequence of doorstop fantasy novels that George R.R. Martin began with “A Game of Thrones”, and which HBO has now turned into […]
A lot of attention has been paid in recent years to energy-hungry China’s billion-dollar bids on oil fields in Canada and the Asian giant’s reliance on oil from countries like Iran and Sudan to fuel its growing economy. But its growing interest in another major oil producer has gone largely unnoticed, and if current trends […]
George Soros cites Isaiah Berlin as an important intellectual influence, so it makes sense to see Soros through one of the Riga-born philosopher’s best-known lenses — the division of the world into foxes and hedgehogs. In his public life, Soros is a broad-minded fox: As a hedge fund manager, his success rested on his ability to make many […]
In the aftermath of the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the Narasimha Rao government reworked India’s dysfunctional economic and foreign policies to improve India’s abysmal terms of trade with the rest of the world. The latest global financial crisis seems to have shaken the United States’ global dominance and is forcing India to revisit its […]
Greek opinions about Germans are changing. When “austerity measures” were first imposed, Greek newspapers and posters infamously depicted Chancellor Merkel as a Nazi leader. But the reaction has lately become more sophisticated: now we hear that Germans want to pursue a strict interpretation of Protestant ethics (which knows no redemption on earth) and punish the […]
It is quite clear to any thinking person that the Tory Party is now a corpse. Any idea that David Cameron could or would revive it must have died at the Rotherham by-election. This astonishing result must surely be the most humiliating treatment of a major political party in modern history. The ‘Conservative’ candidate came fifth. […]
