Remember Aleksandr Bastrykin’s “forest scandal“? In light of the horrors Leonid Razvozzhayev says he endured, merely hauling a journalist out into the woods and threatening his life looks positively quaint. Bastrykin has managed to survive — and indeed thrive — amid not just the forest incident, but also the revelations about his unreported properties and business dealings in Europe. And his sharp […]
China’s currency hit a 19-year high against the U.S. dollar on Friday. Not coincidentally, on the same day the yuan rose to 6.238 against the greenback, disgraced former Politburo member Bo Xilai suffered his latest indignity, with the official Xinhua News Agency announcing his removal from the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp legislature. “According to the law on […]
Four years after the start of the Great Recession, the global economy has not recovered, voters are losing patience and governments around the world are falling like ninepins. This is a situation conducive to revolutionary thinking, if not yet in politics, then maybe in economics. In the past few months the International Monetary Fund, previously […]
Never mind the troubles of the West; the rest have problems too. Look at Turkey. A couple of years ago, this was a nation with an Ottoman spring in its step. Tired of rejection by Europe, it decided to seize new opportunities in the East. The economy was booming and Ankara had made friends of […]
The defining image from the October 22 debate between President Obama and presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is of the two candidates passionately disputing their prescriptions for the U.S. domestic economy. The moderator, veteran TV journalist Bob Schieffer, caught the spirit of the evening with his final words before inviting the debaters to make their closing […]
In ways big and small, Asia is still living with the tainted legacy of imperialism. Consider the debate now underway in Myanmar – or Burma to some. Because the imperial tongue found it difficult to pronounce “Myanmar,” the country’s no-nonsense British masters renamed it Burma (redrawing its borders as well for good measure). The new […]
Indian companies which invested in controversial deals involving hundreds of thousands of acres of land in Ethiopia have found themselves out of their depth in a fast-growing African economy that is still in the process of building critical transport and irrigation networks. Read Here – The Hindu
On Oct. 8, the House Select Intelligence Committee released a report on the cybersecurity threat posed by China‘s Huawei and ZTE, the world’s second- and fourth-largest telecommunications suppliers. The report, which described the companies as potential espionage risks and asked the U.S. government and U.S. firms to refrain from doing business with them, drew an angry response […]
LIKE THE human-rights movement, democracy promotion is a radical project of social and political transformation whose adherents will not or cannot acknowledge either the ideological or the revolutionary character of their enterprise. In this, democracy promotion should be understood as a subset of contemporary liberalism—the only major modern ideology that denies it is an ideology […]
This time it’s the New York Times that has Chinese Internet censors raising the digital gates. Shortly after the publication of a lengthy article Nov. 26 asserting that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s family members “have controlled assets worth at least $2.7 billion,” the media company’s English and Chinese websites were blocked within China. Then came the official […]
