The recent 18th Party Conference has been widely seen as a victory for retired Chinese President Jiang Zemin. Ten years after leaving office his faction remains a force to be reckoned with in the Communist Party — outgoing President Hu Jintao succeeded in placing only one close ally, Prime Minister Li Keqiang, on the Politburo […]
The Internet has sustained some pretty intense assaults in the past couple of years. There was the heavy-handed attempt to stamp out content piracy with SOPA/PIPA, the Federal Communications Commission’s Net neutrality ruling, which many saw assplitting the baby, and that whack job who claimed to own a patent on the World Wide Web. It is again open season […]
BRITAIN has never been too keen on tying the knot with Europe. It sat aside in the 1950s as Germany, France, Italy and the Benelux countries forged a single market in coal and steel, which became a broader common market. It eventually joined, in 1973, largely because Europe seemed to be where the money was. […]
On December 1, 2012, more than a third of eligible Kuwaiti voters went to the polls for the second time in 10 months to elect yet another parliament. Kuwaitis have been to the polls five times over the past six and a half years and have elected five parliaments, all of which were dissolved before […]
Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi has cancelled a decree that gave him sweeping powers and sparked deadly violence, but did not delay this month’s referendum on a new constitution as his opponents had demanded. The announcement that Mursi had scrapped his November 22 decree followed hours of talks on Saturday at his presidential palace, billed as […]
The return of protests, tanks and death to the streets of Cairo this week is harrowing. So is the power of the rampant conspiracy theories that cause Muslim Brotherhood members and their secular opponents to sincerely believe they are defending Egypt’s revolution. Both sides are behaving abominably. Criticisms of President Mohamed Mursi’s foolish and unnecessary […]
In the eight hundred years since his death, people have sought in vain for the grave of Genhis Khan, the 13th-century conqueror and imperial ruler who, at the time of his death, occupied the largest contiguous empire, stretching from the Caspian Sea to the Pacific. In capturing most of central Asia and China, his armies […]
Three weeks in, the new administration of Xi Jinping has already begun work on a major project that represents a sharp break from the Hu administration: spin. Xi’s speeches and appearances of the past month have drawn a sharp contrast with his predecessor’s studied lack of personality. His public speeches as leader of the Party […]
In mid-2010, thousands of centrifuges, enriching uranium at Iranian nuclear research facilities, spun out of control. The instruments were mysteriously reprogrammed to operate faster than normal, pushing them to the breaking point. Iranian computer systems, however, inexplicably reported that the centrifuges were operating normally. This incident, it was later revealed, was the work of the […]
Since 9/11, a quiet intelligence revolution has been brewing inside many of America‘s leading companies. Hotel chains, cruise lines, airlines, theme parks, banks, chemical companies, consumer products manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies, and even tech giants have been developing in-house intelligence units that look and act a lot like the CIA. These organizations don’t steal competitor trade […]
