Edelmina Flores thanks God and Hugo Chávez for her apartment in a new housing complex in the Venezuelan president’s home state of Barinas. She might also want to thank the Chinese government. Since 2007, the China Development Bank has lent Venezuela $42.5 billion, backed by revenue from Venezuelan crude. That sum accounts for nearly a quarter […]
Despite all the attention the trade deficit receives each month, little heed has been paid to the rapid expansion of U.S. exports, which have been growing nearly three times faster than gross domestic product since 2005. As a share of the U.S. economy, exports are at their highest point in 50 years. Rather than slow […]
Austria has a newcomer on the political scene and, in contrast to neighboring Germany, it is not a rabble-rousing band of computer nerds. Billionaire Frank Stronach made a fortune in the auto parts industry. Now, he has created a new political party in the hopes of shaking up the status quo. Read Here – Der […]
No one in the 20th century was responsible for more deaths than Mao Zedong (1893-1976), chairman of the Chinese Communist Party; not Lenin, Stalin or even Hitler. The sheer size of China meant that Mao’s vicious, carefully premeditated policies led to more death, starvation, suffering and bloodshed than the work of anyone else in history’s […]
Parts of Aleppo‘s historic souk, or marketplace, have been burnt to the ground. The storied Sissi House, one of the region’s finest restaurants and famous for its tasty cherry lamb kebabs, has reportedly burnt down. Dar Zamaria, part of a wave of chic boutique hotels being carved out of Ottoman merchant houses (and which I reviewed […]
It was five o’clock on a Sunday in May, two hours before showtime, but already thousands of K-pop fans had flooded the concrete playa outside the Honda Center, a large arena in Anaheim, California. Tonight’s performers were among the biggest pop groups in South Korea—shinee, f(x), Super Junior, EXO, TVXQ!, and Girls’ Generation. In the […]
In terms of symbolism, Arvind Kejriwal could scarcely have chosen a better date to found a new political party dedicated to ending corruption in India. On Oct. 2, the birthday of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the 44-year-old activist announced to a gaggle of followers and a battery of cameras, “We declare that from today this country’s […]
When news of Russian Prsident Vladimir Putin’s October visit to Pakistan raised eyebrows all around, a Russian diplomat’s throwaway line over how mistaken one was, and that, in fact, Pakistan and Russia had a lot more in common than everyone thought, seemed more wishful thinking than fact. That India and Russia could be on opposite […]
When Kuwait’s next ruler takes power he will need to reassure competing factions in the Al-Sabah dynasty that he is protecting their interests and maintaining stability, making progress toward democratic reforms unlikely, at least at the beginning. Current ruler Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, 83, has resisted opposition demands for more policy-making authority in an increasingly […]
In 2006 Egyptian human rights activist Wael Abbas posted a video online of police sodomizing a bus driver with a stick, leading to the rare prosecution of two officers. Later, Abbas’s YouTube account was suddenly suspended because he had violated YouTube‘s guidelines banning “graphic or gratuitous violence.” YouTube restored the account after human rights groups informed its parent company Google that Abbas’s posts were a […]
