What Next For Nawaz Sharif?

Disqualified from holding public office, disqualified from holding party office and now, sentenced to 10 years in jail by an accountability court — it has been a year of massive political and personal setbacks for Nawaz Sharif. The legal dimensions of the accountability court judgement will be pored over by independent analysts and can be assessed at […]

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After Erdogan’s Win, What’s Next For Turkey’s Foreign Policy?

Turkey’s relations with the West have never been as tense and turbulent as under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In addition, few governments in the Middle East appear to be enamoured with Ankara’s interference in the region’s affairs. Following Erdogan’s recent electoral victory, however, it is ties with the West that will determine much, especially now that Erdogan is effectively Turkey’s sole […]

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Malaysia’s Mahathir Pulls Off Second Political Act Just Like Churchill, Abe, Berlusconi And BiBi

With his shock victory in Malaysia’s election, Mahathir Mohamad has pulled off a political second act that few expected, joining the select ranks of politicians who have revived their careers. The 92-year-old former strongman ruled Malaysia with an iron fist for more than two decades before stepping down, but returned to political life to challenge his […]

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Malaysia’s Unappetising Choice

That Malaysia is in a funk is hardly in doubt. Najib’s rule has been marred by accusations of cronyism, most obviously the farrago over sovereign wealth fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad, in which $4.5 billion is alleged to have been siphoned off by managers and associates, according to a U.S. Justice Department probe. The prime minister […]

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Cambridge Analytica Shuts Down All Offices Amid Ongoing Facebook Crisis

Cambridge Analytica, the embattled data firm that worked on President Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, has told employees it is shutting down, along with its UK counterpart SCL Elections. The move, which impacts all offices of both companies worldwide, comes amid recent revelations that the company harvested the data of up to 87 million Facebook users without their consent, […]

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The Cambridge Analaytica Data Apocalypse Was Predicted In 2007

In early 2009 the attendees of a conference published a statement of principles in the prestigious journal Science. In light of the role of social scientists in the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica debacle—slurping up data on online behaviour from millions of users, figuring out the personalities and predilections of those users, and nominally using that knowledge to influence elections—that article turns […]

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The Problem Is Facebook, Not Cambridge Analytica

Facebook is being hammered for allowing the data firm Cambridge Analytica to acquire 50 million user profiles in the U.S., which it may or may not have used 1  to help the Trump campaign. But the outrage misses the target: There’s nothing Cambridge Analytica could have done that Facebook itself doesn’t offer political clients. Read Here – BloombergView Also read: Where […]

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The Politics Of Trade Wars

One inconvenient feature of the global trading system is that efforts to protect the jobs of voting workers in one country risk affecting jobs, and perhaps votes, in another. Thus President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on imported aluminium and steel, offered with the rationale that American metalworkers had been losing jobs to foreign competition, alarmed […]

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