Two years ago this month, Burma’s current government took office amid broad international condemnation for the rigged election — replete with fraud and intimidation — that put it there. Despite this inauspicious start, Burma politics have opened in the last year and a half, and the country’s economy has liberalized more quickly than any other […]
The United States is on the threshold of comprehensive immigration reform. Between the president and the coalition in the Senate, it looks likely it will pass, which means that within a few years we shall have 11 million new Americans with full voting rights. What will their emergence from the shadows do to our economy? And, perhaps […]
Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s visit to Cairo, the first by an Iranian head of state in decades, may herald the long awaited restoration of historically close ties between the two nations Read Here – Ahramonline
You’ve pulled a nifty diplomatic hat trick when you convince your main competitor to blame himself for your bad behavior—and to consider canceling his opposition to that misbehavior to mollify you! Yet China might pull off such a feat if it protests so long and loudly against the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia that Washington […]
An inconvenient fact is that Indonesia’s economic growth is mainly driven by a commodity boom fuelled by China’s appetite for raw materials and global demand for biofuels. China’s enterprises are building bullet trains while Indian car– and IT-companies compete around the world. Indonesia, all the while, manufactures…essentially nothing. Most international manufacturing companies have moved on to greener […]
Government agencies do not often acknowledge their own errors, but the CIA has done just that with the declassification of intelligence memoranda on the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. The documents show that agency analysts, down to the last minute before the outbreak of fighting, were assuring President Nixon, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and other policymakers […]
We can now discern more or less when the catch-up growth miracle will sputter out. Another seven years or so – enough to bouy global coal, crude, and copper prices for a while – but then it will all be over. China’s demographic dividend will be exhausted. Beijing revealed last week that the country’s working […]
Recently, Moscow Times columnist Yulia Latynina showed how differently the wealthy in the U.S. and Russia use their fortunes. She listed a dozen U.S. robber barons, captains of industry and financiers who founded major universities, libraries and museums. Meanwhile, in Russia, where the number of billionaires is now second only to that of the U.S., the wealthiest mainly buy soccer clubs. Read Here – Moscow Times
Generational change has been postponed again in Saudi Arabia, and the kingdom’s succession process is now clear for the foreseeable future. With King Abdullah’s appointment this week of his half-brother Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz to the position of second deputy prime minister behind Crown Prince Salman, the inner circle of princes that has run the […]
I ENCOUNTERED something on this trip to India that I had never met before: a whole new political community — India’s “virtual middle class.” Its emergence explains a lot about the rise of social protests here, as well as in places like China and Egypt. It is one of the most exciting things happening on […]
