The reason why Xi has chosen Russia as his first state visit is simple and clear: to raise China-Russia cooperation to a new level and inject new vigor into bilateral relations by continuing with the past and opening up the future,or, as Putin put it, to vigorously promote cooperation and people-to-people exchange between the two […]
The archipelago nation (The Philippines) is a timely case study of how religion and economic development often don’t mix. The church professes to help those most in need and preaches the gospel of protecting society’s weakest — poor women and children. How, then, can the bishops who wield such disproportionate power over Southeast Asia’s fifth-biggest economy fight […]
Columbia University’s English Department may seem a surprising place from which to move the world, but this is what Professor Edward Said accomplished. He not only transformed the West’s perception of the Israel–Arab conflict, he also led the way toward a new, post-socialist life for leftism in which the proletariat was replaced by “people of […]
Would Turkey be a moderating influence on political Islam, in particular on the Muslim Brotherhood parties now dominant in much of the new Middle East? Will Erdogan make the country a unique Islamic liberal democracy that will reconcile the Muslim world to the West? Read Here – World Affairs
Chinese are coming to Africa in ever greater numbers and finding it a comfortable place to visit, work in and trade. An estimated 1m are now resident in Africa, up from a few thousand a decade ago, and more keep arriving. Chinese are the fourth-most-numerous visitors to South Africa. Among them will be China’s new […]
Pakistan‘s Punjab province selects well known journalist Najam Sethi as caretaker chief minister, as the country prepares for a fresh round of elections. Read Here – The Dawn
This week, 5,000 delegates from developing nations have gathered in the coastal city of Durban for the fifth annual BRICS summit, and the first to be held in South Africa, which joined the association of emerging national economies in 2010, formally becoming the “S” in the BRIC wall. But the location of this year’s summit underscores […]
As the U.S. and coalition forces prepare to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, with all combat forces out by the end of 2014, the governments of Central Asia are bracing for a possible spillover of instability from their south. Ostensibly to help Central Asian countries protect themselves against the Islamist radicals that may gain strength in […]
On a table in the office of a senior Indian diplomat sits an unusual piece of memorabilia: a baseball bat. It is signed not by members of the official’s favourite baseball team, but by the U.S. officials who participated in the inaugural session of the now well-established consultations between India and the United States on […]
Is China having a first lady moment? It would certainly seem so. Peng Liyuan, a.k.a. Mrs. Xi Jinping, the wife of China’s new president, has emerged swiftly and seemingly decisively, into an overtly more prominent first-lady role than we’ve seen for some time in China. To be fair she has the track record to be […]
