Governments love to use external enemies as a way to further their agendas. Alarmed by reports that American spies are gathering data from popular web services , Ilya Kostunov, a lawmaker from Vladimir Putin‘s United Russia party in the lower house of government, yesterday said he wants state officials to stop using US social networks and email […]
For some 45 years after the end of World War II, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were locked in a deadly embrace of the Cold War. Then, communism lost the war of ideologies, the Soviet empire collapsed, and the two superpowers went in different directions. Nevertheless, it never ceases to amaze me how the two countries still seem to be joined at the hip, with the U.S. at times imitating and at times almost […]
China’s economic headache just got a little worse. Along with rising local debt, plunging exports, and lackluster investment, add the specter of weak employment. Read Here – Businessweek
India’s political, cultural, and historical ties to Central Asia date back to antiquity. But contemporary circumstances, namely the quest for energy and the threat of terrorism, have imparted a new urgency, adding strategic realities to historical tradition. Read Here – The Diplomat
New Delhi will be confronted by a host of rapidly changing scenarios in Afghanistan as the country heads for transition in the security and political sectors in 2014. The interplay between different actors jockeying for power could either allow India to retain its present level of engagement, provide opportunities to expand its influence or bring […]
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
Xinhua – Severe crisis seems to have gripped India‘s main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) with barely a year to go for the general elections. Read Here Economist – India’s main opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), could hardly have chosen differently. At a big party gathering, in Goa, on June 9th, its leaders picked Narendra […]
Some of America‘s biggest social media and tech companies have been denying in recent days that they were aware of the National Security Agency’s recently-exposed “PRISM” and telephone monitoring programs. But these denials obscure a larger truth: The government’s massive data collection and surveillance system was largely built not by professional spies or Washington bureaucrats […]
China’s lack of transparency has long posed a daunting challenge to outside observers trying to understand what the government’s interests, goals, and intentions are. Gary King, a Professor in Government at Harvard University, has provided telling new insights into these questions with his research on the government’s censorship of social media websites. Read Here – The […]
Little noticed during last weekend’s milestone summit between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping was another landmark event: China’s currency hit a record high, reaching almost 6 yuan to the dollar. In recent years, one of the few things Republicans and Democrats could agree upon was that an artificially cheap yuan damaged U.S. exports and stole U.S. jobs. The […]
