IT IS an epic story of warring factions in a strange and changing landscape, a tale of incursions and sieges, of plots and betrayals, of battlefield brilliance and of cunning with coin. The sequence of doorstop fantasy novels that George R.R. Martin began with “A Game of Thrones”, and which HBO has now turned into […]
It is quite clear to any thinking person that the Tory Party is now a corpse. Any idea that David Cameron could or would revive it must have died at the Rotherham by-election. This astonishing result must surely be the most humiliating treatment of a major political party in modern history. The ‘Conservative’ candidate came fifth. […]
“We want to survive,” read signs carried by the hundreds of protestors who thronged the streets of Ningbo, a southeastern Chinese coastal city, from Friday through Sunday. Their demand: that the local government scrap plans for an $8.9 billion expansion of a petrochemical plant to be operated by a subsidiary of state-run oil giant Sinopec. By Sunday […]
Many foreign policy mandarins might not like or understand it, but the foreign policy operating environment is changing quickly. When in 2011 the Swedish Foreign Minister, Carl Bildt, was unable to get in touch with his Bahraini counterpart during the heat of the protest movement there, he opted to publicly shame him via Twitter. When General Electric was […]
The team in charge of tracking Facebook’s (FB) growth works on the second floor of Building 17. Most days, the offices are like anywhere else at Facebook: whiteboards, toys on desks, shorts and flip-flops, pretty low-key. Around noon on Sept. 14, the second floor was packed. In one of the common areas, a giant screen showed the […]
The tragedy of India is not the explosion that we have witnessed in the visual media. The tragedy is the complete disconnect that exists between the media and the reality on the ground. The plight of the people in the left wing extremism affected villages is not even the concern of the media at the […]
BARBARIC and bumbling, leaping over boulders in sockless high top sneakers, their faces hidden behind black cloth, the Taliban of yesteryear seemed a scruffy lot with sinister intentions. When Pakistanis first heard of them, long before Sept 11, 2001 and long before they showed up in Swat or recruited allies in Sialkot, they appeared incapable of orchestrating anything […]
The unrelenting negative reports about Facebook Inc. (FB) are enough to rattle even the true believers among us. Yet it would be premature to despair over the company’s long-term viability and health. Facebook is still potentially the most valuable information-based business. It had 955 million monthly active users at the end of June, and benefits from a tremendous […]
looking beyond borders 