German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble warned on Tuesday that failure to win the battle against youth unemployment could tear Europe apart, and dropping the continent’s welfare model in favor of tougher U.S. standards would spark a revolution. Read Here – Reuters
Yet again Iraq finds itself at a ‘crossroad’ – a euphemism for political intransigence to the point of paralysis coupled with a spike in violence, cruelty and ethno-sectarian entrenchment. As with all such crossroads since 2003 the idea that Iraq needs to – or indeed inevitably will – fragment into three states with neat ethno-sectarian […]
For Chinese audiences, the extras mown down in a screen war that never ends are a powerful reminder of Japan’s brutal 14-year occupation, the climax of more than a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. Japanese foreign-policy scholars say more than 200 anti-Japanese films were made last year. This well-nursed grudge is now a […]
Islam appears to hold a strange fascination for white British women who are converting to it in large numbers. Of an estimated 50,000 or so white Britons who convert to Islam every year, some two-thirds are thought to be women. Most of them are independent career women — bankers, doctors, broadcasters — who know what […]
Modern history is the story of how liberal democracy, originating in the U.K. and America, spread around the world. This may sound like an absurd fantasy. In actuality, this Whiggish narrative of progress underpins most newspaper editorials, political commentary and speeches in the West, and frames larger views of political developments in the non-West. Read […]
In Asia’s developing countries, the power and potential of remittances – the money that migrant workers send home to their families (many of whom live in poor and remote areas) – is immense. Currently, over 60 million migrant workers from the Asia/Pacific region account for more than half of all remittance flows to developing countries, […]
Numbers are important in explaining political issues and interpreting election results but they are rarely used to identify a person’s political affiliation, much less a person’s religion. In Southeast Asia, however, where numerology has retained its appeal among the masses, numbers are increasingly being used by politicians and religious leaders in support of a particular […]
Is it a Malthusianism catastrophe, or the stuff of farmers’ dreams? With forecasts of Asian food demand doubling by 2050, will the Asia-Pacific’s expanding middle class make agriculture the new oil? Among those answering in the affirmative are commodities traders like Jim Rogers, who has warned of food riots and told investors to buy storable produce. Read […]
VLADIMIR PUTIN came to power on May 7th 2000 under the banner of economic reform, modernisation and anti- corruption. In a bow to Russian history he ordered that “The Gulag Archipelago”, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 book about Stalin’s Soviet forced-labour camp system, be made a set text for Russian schoolchildren, a radical move as the book […]
China is in the midst of an urban revolution, with hundreds of millions of migrants moving into cities every year. Since 2011, for the first time in history, more than half of China’s 1.3 billion citizens (690 million people) are living in cities. Another 300-400 million are expected to be added to China’s cities in […]
looking beyond borders 