One year has passed since Russia awakened. A negative trend had dominated the past 12 years in Russia: The number of freedoms decreased while abuses of the Kremlin‘s power increased. This was largely met by indifference among the people. But in December 2011, that indifference ended with the beginning of the protest movement. The country was set on a new path that will lead to either the overthrow of the regime […]
It may be Asia’s 21stcentury equivalent of the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Ferdinand that sparked World War I. Growing tensions over territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas threaten to disrupt the oft-heralded Asian Century. Whatever the outcome, many see more than just competing nationalisms, the scars of national memory and the rise of […]
“I’d kill for a drink of water,” could be a military call-to-arms soon, as the planet’s most essential commodity is swallowed, evaporated, polluted, and utilized at unsustainable levels. Earth contains a finite, unchanging amount of H2O. Usage has escalated dangerously, due to human population explosion (1.65 billion – 9 billion from 1900-2025) and the myriad […]
In 2011, when Algeria’s Religious Affairs Minister Bouabdallah Ghlamallah awarded the contract to build the Grand Mosque of Algiers, the third-largest such structure in the world, it did not go to a homegrown Algerian bidder nor to one based in a fellow Muslim-majority Arab nation like Lebanon, nor even to one in a nearby non-Muslim […]
“We are moving away from a U.S. – or Europe-led world to a world led by China,” writes Stephen King, Chief Global Economist at HSBC in a report. HSBC’s Emerging Market Index for the last quarter of 2012 tells investors to think of the global economy in terms of “two separate narratives.” The first is the “old world” […]
Shinzo Abe is known to be staunchly pro-Indian. Not only did he describe strengthening bilateral ties as extremely important to Japan’s interests in his 2006 book Utsukushii Kuni E (Towards a Beautiful Country), but one of his major foreign policy initiatives during his previous tenure as PM was establishing a new vision for bilateral ties with India. […]
As US President Barack Obama begins his second term, he needs a simple way to express his vision and policies for the economy – a metaphor around which support for his policies might crystallize, thereby boosting his administration’s political effectiveness. So, what makes a successful metaphor work? The 2008 Obama campaign used the slogan “Change […]
The Pacific Islands region is in the midst of an information and communications technology (ICT) revolution that could have profound implications, particularly for democratic governance and the region’s development. Approximately 60 per cent of Pacific Islanders now have access to a mobile phone and this figure continues to climb. Mobile Internet is leapfrogging obvious barriers […]
On this, the 100th birthday of Richard Nixon, the slogan from his first campaign for Congress is the salient fact: “One of us.” His dreams were ours — and so, in the end, were his sins. The life of no president says more about this country. Nixon’s accomplishments sing of the finest American attributes — […]
As Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party national defense task force announced on Jan. 8 that it would increase the nation’s defense budget by more than 100 billion yen ($1.15 billion), three of five scenarios explored by the defense ministry recently involve the Self-Defense Forces squaring off against the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). While contingencies involving North Korea’s ballistic […]
looking beyond borders 