There’s been much discussion over British aid to booming India, but in the 19th Century a village in southern England was saved by aid coming the other way. It was the mid-1800s in southeast England, and a little boy was being beaten by his mother for drinking the last of the water in their house during […]
IT IS an epic story of warring factions in a strange and changing landscape, a tale of incursions and sieges, of plots and betrayals, of battlefield brilliance and of cunning with coin. The sequence of doorstop fantasy novels that George R.R. Martin began with “A Game of Thrones”, and which HBO has now turned into […]
One might be tempted to draw comparisons, but it can also become an obsession. Still, that’s exactly what Berliners tend to do, at least when it comes to their city. Whenever it happens, Berlin suddenly isn’t good enough for them, and they constantly feel compelled to draw comparisons — not with just any old cities, […]
Kasab, the world came to call him, “the butcher”: butcher not because he shot dead 55 women, men and children, Hindu and Muslim at short range with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, but because it denoted his underprivileged southern Punjab caste. For millions of Indians, the man caught on closed circuit television cameras as he walked […]
A CLUTCH of archaeologists sits in a freshly upholstered auditorium near the Roman amphitheatre in Leptis Magna to learn how to use a global positioning system, something restricted to the security forces under Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. “Take a picture, then note the co-ordinates,” says an instructor, showing slides of the ruins (pictured above). The country […]
Touring the luxurious campus of the American University of Sharjah last week, I was yet again struck by what money, especially petrodollars, can buy. Sharjah is an emirate of the United Arab Emirates, located adjacent to Abu Dhabi. Designed by the ruler of Sharjah, Sultan Bin Mohammad Al Qassimi, one of the more enlightened of […]
It’s not the eco-nomy, stupid! That is the biggest takeaway from the recent presidential election in America. If anything, it was really about identity. As Barack Obama was not of the right colour, his opponents felt that his elevation in 2008 was because they had not stressed identity enough. They would have dearly liked to peel his skin off, […]
The GCC countries have seen an unprecedented explosion in economic growth in the past few decades. That growth has been matched by a similar increase in population in recent years, helped in some GCC countries by state subsidies paid out to parents of each newborn. However, what are state and public institutions doing to prepare […]
As the networked world of the internet makes that which is distant seem very local, reality can be both distorted and amplified. The unfortunate “Innocence of Muslims” video served as a catalyst for the dissatisfaction felt by many toward American support of Arab nations. Yet this would not have occurred without the ability to spread […]
In the last half century, East Asia emerged as the uber-performer on the global economic stage. The various countries in the region found success with substantially different systems: state-led capitalism in South Korea, Singapore and Japan; wild and wooly competitive, entrepreneur-led growth in Taiwan and Hong Kong; and more recently, what Deng Xiaoping once described as […]
looking beyond borders 