On June 8, Juan Cole, one of the few true Middle East experts in the US, posted a short entry on hisInformed Comment blog. The title said it all: “We misunderstood Barack: He only wanted the domestic surveillance to be made legal, not to end it”. But domestic surveillance was far from the only Bush policy that Obama has […]
The World Bank’s Doing Business rankings rate countries on the complexity and time taken to follow the official steps to set up and run a company. It may sound like a banal process, but the ranking has sparked a bitter international argument. Read Here – Businessweek
Secrecy is only supposed to work for the strong against the weak. Right now Edward Snowden, the former CIA technical operative who leaked data exposing the extent of Anglo-American state internet surveillance to the world, is in hiding in Hong Kong. Snowden, 29, sacrificed everything to tell the world. Read Here – New Statesman
With a general election approaching in Germany this fall, Angela Merkel finds herself mired in a scandal about her communist upbringing. The belated reckoning with Merkel’s past reveals little about the chancellor’s political sympathies — and plenty about the German public’s historical ignorance. Read Here – Foreign Affairs
The Irish economy’s dependence on foreign multinationals is without parallel in the developed world. Foreign-owned companies account for a larger proportion of jobs – in both services and manufacturing – than in any other country in the 34-member OECD. Of the €177 billion earned from exports last year, 90 per cent was generated by non-Irish […]
China’s influence in post-Soviet Central Asia has steadily grown for 20 years. Beijing, striving to suppress Uighur separatist movements in and beyond its own Xinjiang province as well as to tap into Central Asian development projects, has backed the neighboring region’s largely unpopular authoritarian regimes. As a result, the populations’ receptiveness to Islamic forms of […]
The United States will remain the world’s most powerful nation for years to come, but the Obama administration and U.S. lawmakers are now focused on debt, immigration, guns and growth. A war-weary, under-employed American public wants results at home, leaving U.S. officials to look for allies willing to share costs and risks abroad. Unfortunately, it’s not easy […]
Enrico Letta, Italy’s new prime minister, says he can reinvigorate his country’s ailing economy by slashing taxes and downsizing government…Letta plans to roll back taxes imposed by his predecessor, Mario Monti, while offsetting the lost revenues with as-yet-unspecified budget reductions. Lettanomics could represent the first big test of the anti-austerity movement that has been gaining steam […]
For all those who had been expecting it, this is it: Italy’s Third Republic began on April 20, 2013 with the re-election of 88-year old Giorgio Napolitano as president. If you believed that the new republic had already started with the nomination of Mario Monti as prime minister in late 2011, you are mistaken. Monti was […]
When policy makers disparage Kissinger in private, they tend to do so in a manner that reveals how much they measure themselves against him. The former secretary of state turns 90 this month. To mark his legacy, we need to begin in the 19th century. Read Here – The Atlantic
