Pundits and the press too often treat terrorism and guerrilla tactics as something new, a departure from old-fashioned ways of war. But nothing could be further from the truth. Throughout most of our species’ long and bloody slog, warfare has primarily been carried out by bands of loosely organized, ill-disciplined, and lightly armed volunteers who […]
CHINA is known for its industrial might. Manufacturers, miners, utilities and builders accounted for over 45% of China‘s GDP in 2012. In America, by contrast, they contributed less than 20%. China, according to caricature, makes things—things you can drop on your foot. Soft-toed America merely designs, brands and peddles them. Read Here – The Economist
Recent political debate in the United States and other advanced capitalist democracies has been dominated by two issues: the rise of economic inequality and the scale of government intervention to address it. As the 2012 U.S. presidential election and the battles over the “fiscal cliff” have demonstrated, the central focus of the left today is […]
Trade numbers for 2012 show that China has become the world’s biggest trader, unseating the United States that has ruled the global trading charts for several decades. It is a momentous shift that is bound to have far-reaching impact on the way Beijing sees itself and the manner it influences geopolitics. As it becomes the […]
Two years ago …, a popular uprising ended Hosni Mubarak‘s thirty-year reign. Egypt’s revolution is still churning, of course, and that country is now deeply polarized between the ruling Muslim Brotherhood, which has embraced many of Mubarak’s autocratic tendencies in its attempt to consolidate power, and a non-Islamist opposition that fears theocratic rule in Egypt. […]
Singapore has often been cited as a success story, the envy of governments around the world. But simmering underneath the gloss and the shine lies a much more complex story of a nation slowly outgrowing a patriarchal government and restrictive system. Not long after losing a by-election, the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) launched a White […]
Few news items over the past year had more entertainment value than one concerning the Onion and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. It was funny enough that the faux-news website named the double-chinned Kim the sexiest man of 2012. More entertaining still was that the People’s Daily, the stern mouthpiece of China’s Communist Party, fell for it. Read Here […]
As the slowdown in the world’s major industrial economies drags on, growth in developing Asia is being affected. A serious burden will likely be placed on the region’s major economies, particularly its two giants, India and China. Both countries’ external sectors have clearly been hit hard, while domestic consumption is stagnating. Fixed-asset investment in India […]
…There is a need for US President Barack Obama to come up with a genuine initiative in his second term to move the Middle East peace process towards that lofty goal of a two-state solution. That failure, along with the ad hoc handling of the forces of change in the republics of the Arab Spring, […]
Only a month is left for the scheduled dissolution of Pakistan’s National Assembly and, as per the law, elections have to be held within two months thereafter. In any other country, political parties would be in the throes of preparing for the electoral battle ahead. Not so in Pakistan. Here, everyone, politicians included, are plucking […]
