When Muammar al-Qaddafi came in from the cold in the mid-2000s, the “mad dog” of the Middle East embarked upon top-down reforms that were friendly to international markets, investors, the United States, and Europe. Although he became the subject of sympathetic profiles in major Western media outlets, those articles almost never emphasised the fact that […]
China is racing to become the first to implement a pervasive system of algorithmic surveillance. Harnessing advances in artificial intelligence and data mining and storage to construct detailed profiles on all citizens, China’s communist party-state is developing a “citizen score” to incentivize “good” behavior. A vast accompanying network of surveillance cameras will constantly monitor citizens’ […]
The more spontaneous interactions a president has, the greater the chances for the dreaded gaffe, which is why the president’s Twitter feed has been known to cause heartburn among U.S. national-security professionals. Trump relies not just on national-security and media-relations teams to craft anodyne public statements, but also on his ability to communicate directly with […]
The 19th Party Congress will select about 200 people to run China for the next five years, from army generals to executives from China’s biggest state-run conglomerates. A week of pageantry culminates when President Xi Jinping and the handful of other leaders on the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee walk onto a red-carpeted stage to present themselves to […]
The U.S. just elected the oldest new president in history, and Congress, too, has been getting consistently older, with its average age now up around 60. But the vast majority of the government consists of the 2 million-strong federal civilian workforce. And thanks to slow-moving hiring practices and a huge cohort of baby boomers who […]
The case for government spending during economic slowdowns has been hotly debated for decades. John Maynard Keynes went as far as to suggest that during a recession governments should pay people to do meaningless tasks — such as digging holes in the ground and then filling them up. Read Here – BloombergView
Shahid Khaqan Abbasi was sworn in as prime minister of Pakistan in an oath-taking ceremony held at President House on Tuesday. He was elected prime minister by lawmakers in the National Assembly, bagging 221 votes to become the successor to ousted prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Read Here – Dawn Also Read: Meet the new prime minister
Nepalese citizens hold an estimated $500 million in the banned notes, most of them sent back as savings by the more than one million Nepalese nationals working in India, says Chiranjibi Nepal, governor of the country’s central bank, the Nepal Rashtra Bank. Yet seven months after the ban, India has yet to exchange those notes […]
Theresa May has vowed to continue as prime minister after agreeing what was dubbed an “Irish Bailout” from the Democratic Unionist Party. Speaking in Downing Street, after a 20-minute meeting with the Queen, a grim-faced Ms May announced she had the backing of the DUP to provide the “certainty” the country needed. Read Here – […]
Behind a lot of the technology we take for granted in our lives—the satellite mapping behind Google Maps, or the voice recognition software behind your iPhone’s Siri—lie not just inventive tech companies, but the sclerotic old federal government. Across the country, Washington funds a network of advanced—sometimes secret, often underappreciated—government laboratories dedicated to blue-sky, “what-the-hell” […]
looking beyond borders 