The cabinet reshuffle likely this Sunday will include a restructuring of the Congress party as well to prepare for upcoming crucial assembly elections, according to party leaders aware of the developments. The cabinet reshuffle may see a group of young leaders entering government, two Congress leaders said, declining to be named. External affairs minister S.M. Krishna stepped […]
One of 70-odd rockets fired from Gaza into Israel this week hit a chicken coop, critically wounding two Thai migrant workers, innocent bystanders in a deadly game of brinkmanship. If it had killed children on the Israeli farm they work for, Israel and Gaza would probably be at war right now. Gaza’s Islamist rulers, Hamas, […]
Tensions between Japan and China over the Senkaku (Diaoyu) islands are continuing, as indicated by continued obstacles to Japanese businesses in China, a drastic decline in tourism, and Chinese patrols near the islands. This is both a Sino-Japanese issue and a part of a broader confrontation between China on one side and the United […]
Despite the revulsion that Asif Zardari invokes among his detractors, even his most bitter critics are often forced to acknowledge with admiration, if also intense frustration, how Pakistan’s unlikely president has for all intents and purposes outsmarted all his opponents and ridden out all the storms to take the PPP-led coalition to almost the finish […]
As we have pointed out previously, in the principal divided-country scenarios of the second half of the 20th century — North and South Vietnam, East and West Germany, North and South Yemen — reunification was thought of for decades as only a remote possibility, before it suddenly occurred in a tumultuous, fast-moving fashion, in a way few of […]
The Iraq War might seem a thing of the past. But nearly ten years after combat began, the United States and its allies are using policies to address the Iranian nuclear challenge that are eerily similar to those it pursued in the run-up to Operation Enduring Freedom. Just as they did with Saddam Hussein, concerned […]
Michael Feroli, chief U.S. economist at JPMorgan Chase, has a fascinating analysis out Thursday on how Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is moving to lock in new procedures for setting interest rates that will last long after his term ends in January 2014. The upshot is that Bernanke, who vowed to depersonalize the Fed, could end […]
The mother of China’s prime minister was a schoolteacher in northern China. His father was ordered to tend pigs in one of Mao’s political campaigns. And during childhood, “my family was extremely poor,” the prime minister, Wen Jiabao, said in a speech last year. But now 90, the prime minister’s mother, Yang Zhiyun, not only left poverty […]
George Osborne has seized on news that the economy has emerged from double-dip recession, growing by 1% in the third quarter of 2012, as evidence that his policies have put Britain “on the right track”. The figures, announced by the Office for National Statistics on Thursday, mean the chancellor will be able to deliver his autumn statement […]
Historian Arnold Toynbee likened America to a ”large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over something.” More recent chroniclers have not been as charitable. They ascribe to the United States less innocence, and credit it with a more predatory outlook in its pursuit of global domination […]
