There’s good news and bad in China’s loss of traction. The good: It will compel President Xi Jinping to end China’s addiction to easy credit and local-government debt, a recipe that’s now causing more bubbles than growth. The bad: Global markets may not be ready for the ugly data about to emanate from an economy […]
Mr Modi’s government has proceeded in a manner exactly predictable from his claims and promises on the campaign trail. He will not change the bedrock of economic policy since 2004 — the reliance on private-public partnerships, for example. He will instead work towards quicker execution, lower taxes, and a less intrusive state. Read Here – […]
China has launched a formal investigation against Zhou Yongkang, a former member of the Politburo Standing Committee, China’s top decision-making body. Widespread corruption inside the Chinese Communist Party has raised serious questions about the efficacy of its self-regulation. While persistent housecleaning is conducive to the CPC’s image and legitimacy, well-thought-out mechanisms are a more reliable […]
The collection’s story begins in the 1920s, when the Bolsheviks turned what was once the Rumyantsev arts museum into the country’s national library. As the newly anointed Lenin Library began amassing new literature, it also opened a rare book department to house compromising materials, acquired primarily from confiscated noble libraries. Read Here – Moscow Times
In the 1930s travellers returned from Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia, and Hitler’s Germany praising the hearty sense of common purpose they saw there, compared to which their own democracies seemed weak, inefficient, and pusillanimous. Democracies today are in the middle of a similar period of envy and despondency. Authoritarian competitors are aglow with arrogant confidence. […]
Irrespective of its rhetoric to the contrary, throughout the last four decades, the Egyptian government’s policies towards the Palestinians have signalled a marked departure from its historic reputation as a regional leader determined to challenge Israeli hegemony. Read Here – AlJazeera
The arrival of Hamid Karzai, on the heels of the U.S. invasion in 2001, promised Afghans a break from the recent bloody past. Karzai’s lack of involvement in the long, brutal civil war that followed the Soviet retreat in 1989 raised the possibility of a unified country after a decade of battling fiefs. Read Here […]
It’s true that economic growth through industrialization altered the social structure of societies and created demand for political representation. But it’s now clear that the process has also led to the opposite of liberal democracy. Read Here – Bloomberg
It was a massacre. Most of the carnage occurred not in the Square or right around it, but in the western-approaching streets that led to the Square. I viewed the videotapes of bloody bodies that came in with camera crews, and I made phone calls to local hospitals and to the Chinese Red Cross. We […]
looking beyond borders 