Pakistan appeared to be treading toward an uncertain political terrain on Tuesday as arrest orders were issued for a sitting prime minister in a corruption case and a populist cleric called for the government’s resignation leading tens of thousands of protesters into the federal capital. During the early hours of Tuesday, the Pakistani-Canadian chief of the Tehrik-i-Minhajul Quran (TMQ), […]
“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 […]
Elections make for responsive and accountable governments, or so goes the truism. But can they also achieve the opposite — that is, encourage complacency, even callousness, among elected representatives? Last month’s headlines from India and China present a disquieting contrast between elected and unelected governments for anyone committed to democratic politics. Read Here – Bloomberg
Scare stories have been an integral part of the global warming narrative for a long time. Back in 1997, Al Gore told us that global warming was making the El Niño winds stronger and more severe. That has not happened. Greenpeace and many others have told us for years that we will see more violent […]
IN HUNAN province last August, Tang Hui was sentenced to 18 months in a labour camp. Her crime was to demand tougher sentences for the men who had kidnapped and raped her 11-year-old daughter. In days gone by, Ms Tang would simply have disappeared. In the age of the microblog, thousands of incensed middle-class people […]
The world’s food crisis, where 1 billion people are already going hungry and a further 2 billion people will be affected by 2050, is set to worsen as increasing heatwaves reverse the rising crop yields seen over the last 50 years, according to new research. Severe heatwaves, such as those currently seen in Australia, are expected to […]
“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” […]
China recently opened its domestic satellite navigation network to commercial use across the Asia-Pacific region. The move underscored China’s emergence as an independent space power challenging the primacy of the United States, Russia, Europe and Japan. The network offers a still-to-be-proven alternative in the region to the well-established and highly accurate U.S. global positioning system (GPS), […]
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 the 2014 date for the withdrawal of most foreign troops from Afghanistan approaches, the country faces two starkly different futures. One is a return to the civil war conditions of the 1990s that brought disaster and disunity. In this scenario Afghanistan is abandoned by the international community before falling prey to the machinations of […]
looking beyond borders 