Fifty years ago, Burma, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines seemed ready to bloom economically. Each was blessed with an excellent resource base and a strong export sector. Burma was the world’s leading rice exporter, Sri Lanka one of the leading exporters of tea (it became the leading exporter in 1965), and the Philippines the second-largest sugar exporter […]
Open defecation is practiced by more than 600 million Indians, according to the World Health Organization. The WHO calls open defecation the riskiest sanitation practice of all due to the ease of disease spread. More often than not, water is contaminated by the same people who drink it. Open defecation is rampant in slums and rural […]
Turkish self-confidence is high these days – perhaps higher than ever in the history of the modern republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. Ataturk envisioned a pro-western and strictly secular nation-state that would look towards “contemporary civilizations” –that is, Europe –and turn its back on 500 years of coexistence with Arabs. Today’s Turkish leaders yearn […]
The Arab world has to listen to the voice of its youth. This is the generation that will determine the future of the region as much in how it will be attained. The Arab youth is a factor that cannot be ignored or sidelined as their strength is in their numbers, aspirations and voice. A […]
Chairman Mao Zedong said that power comes out of the barrel of a gun, and he knew a thing or two about power, both hard and soft. If you have enough guns, you have respect. Money is the same: if you have enough cash, you can buy guns, and respect. Israel and Saudi Arabia are examples […]
As the beautiful Nihal prepares to marry Behlul, there’s a glitch: Her gun-wielding stepmother declares undying love for the groom. Dangerous liaisons are at the heart ofIshq-e-Memnu, or Forbidden Love, a Turkish drama that was the biggest hit on Pakistani television this past winter. At its peak, the steamy story of a Turkish tycoon and his […]
Read Here – The Economist
Two years ago …, a popular uprising ended Hosni Mubarak‘s thirty-year reign. Egypt’s revolution is still churning, of course, and that country is now deeply polarized between the ruling Muslim Brotherhood, which has embraced many of Mubarak’s autocratic tendencies in its attempt to consolidate power, and a non-Islamist opposition that fears theocratic rule in Egypt. […]
Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline? Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, when historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs, and, […]
Just over twenty years ago, Hindu militants destroyed the sixteenth-century Babri mosque in Ayodhya, northern India, prompting riots around the country that claimed thousands of lives—overwhelmingly Muslim—including nine hundred in Bombay (now Mumbai) alone.* Ten years later, a conflagration of violence in India’s northwestern state of Gujarat killed at least as many Muslims, with the support […]
looking beyond borders 