China is not an empire, and it rejects the deep-rooted imperial thinking in forging diplomatic relations. China was humiliated and bullied for a century, which made the country much more eager for equality than its Western counterparts. Read Here – Global Times
China’s outbound FDI rose 17.6 percent year-on-year in 2012 to a record high of $87.8 billion, according to the 2012 Statistical Bulletin of China’s Outward Foreign Direct Investment, which was released by the Ministry of Commerce, the National Bureau of Statistics and the State Administration of Foreign Exchange. Read Here – China.org.cn
In refusing to consider the views of its peers at the G-20 and the U.N. Security Council, the Obama administration has arrogantly pressed on with its weak case for military intervention Read Here – The Hindu
Iran plans to send the second monkey into space aboard the Pishgam (Pioneer) II space capsule within 45 days, Iran Space Agency director Hamid Fazeli said. Iran had successfully sent a monkey into space and brought it back to Earth safely in January. Read Here – Tehran Times
Six years ago, two Microsoft cryptography researchers discovered some weirdness in an obscure cryptography standard authored by the National Security Agency. There was a bug in a government-standard random number generator that could be used to encrypt data. Read Here – Wired
The United Nations Security Council took an unprecedented step this summer. Pushed principally by the United Kingdom, the council passed its first resolution addressing what it calls “sexual violence in conflict.” That’s a euphemism for an all-too-common problem in many parts of the world: Using rape as a weapon of wartime intimidation. In the human-rights world, it’s called […]
Kevin Rudd, the once extremely popular Prime Minister of Australia who was humiliatingly knifed by his own party and replaced with his deputy Julia Gillard in his first term of government, managed to resurrect himself to face a near impossible re-election battle. Read Here – AlJazeera
Asif Ali Zardari stepped down as Pakistan’s president and plans to rejuvenate his party after it was voted out of power in May’s general elections. Read Here – Bloomberg
It’s five years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, on 15 September 2008. Since then, the legitimacy of capitalism as a way of organising society has been undermined; its promises of prosperity, social mobility and democracy have lost credibility. But there has been no radical change. The system has repeatedly come under fire, but it has […]
The reason that U.S. President Barack Obama passed the buck on authorizing a military strike on Syria to Congress is not because getting congressional approval is the constitutional thing to do. It always has been, although presidents have regularly denied it. Rather, Obama passed the buck to Congress because it was the only way out […]
looking beyond borders 