World
03/16/08 -
Mesh - Turkey’s democracy has long rested on a delicate equilibrium between the guardians of the unitary secular-nationalist paradigm who dominate the civilian and military state bureaucracies on the one hand, and the populist politicians who appeal to the particularistic sub-identities of Turkey’s diverse civil society on the other. The proper functioning of this dynamic depends on the quality of...
03/16/08 -
the monkey cage - While the paper is still a work in progress, I worry that this is one of those cases where game theorists reach confident conclusions on the basis of ceteris paribus conditions, where the ceteris are anything but paribus if you look at them closely. Entirely apart from the ethical implications (which he seems interested in exploring in future iterations of the piece), the conclusion that profiling...
03/16/08 -
rconversation - The Chinese system of Internet censorship and media propaganda may have a lot of holes, but when tested by events like the Tibet unrest this past week, so far it's holding up well enough for the regime's purposes....
03/14/08 -
Christopher McGuinness - We heard these words after Serbia, Rwanda, and Somalia. In fact, we’ve heard them repeated after nearly every war, genocide, or other type of humanitarian crisis in recent memory....
03/14/08 -
EI Diaries - Respected Israeli professor Ilan Pappe has said that genocide "is the only appropriate way to describe what the Israeli army is doing in the Gaza Strip". Genocide is not a word most people use lightly. But words laden with meaning have been used often, where Gaza is concerned, of late....
03/14/08 -
Metro Collective - Iraqis have been fleeing their homes en masse. As displaced victims of war are forced to seek refuge in other parts of Iraq or in neighboring nations, they have turned into a number: 4.9 million unnamed, anonymous non-entities, statistically relevant yet individually insignificant. ...
03/13/08 -
Desi Critics - Food prices have been going through the roof in Pakistan since November, 2007, with long queues in front of fair price shops being turned away owing to shortage of flour. At a time when the Rabi crop harvesting in Sindh has started, which should bring down prices, procurement prices are skyrocketing instead. There has been a decline in wheat-sown acreage, fertilizer off take has reduced and 22 %...
03/13/08 -
East Africa Forum - Lots of people get upset about asylum seekers. “They’re after our health service they’re economic migrants they’re rich enough to pay people-smugglers they’re potential terrorists.” But who are they really? According to the Home Office, in 2006, the latest full year available, 10% of asylum seekers to the UK (2400 people) came from Afghanistan, with 2375 people from Iran; there are...
03/13/08 -
The Long War Journal - The search for Mosul’s kidnapped Chaldean Catholic Archbishop has met a tragic ending. After a two week search by Iraqi and US forces stationed in Mosul, the body of Chaldean Catholic Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho was found dead inside the city limits. Iraqi interpreters assigned to the 4th Brigade of the 2nd Iraqi Army Division confirmed Rahho’s body was found in Mosul....
03/13/08 -
Whirledview - An air of jubilation greeted the results of the recent parliamentary elections in Pakistan. The count showed that the President’s party of opportunists (Muslim League-Quaid) had been reduced to a minority, assuming that the Pakistan People’s Party and the remains of the real Pakistan Muslim League can form a workable coalition government, as they have pledged to do....
03/13/08 -
Suhaib Webb - I had the opportunity to meet some French sisters who are now here with me in Cairo, and we got to talking about the issue of Islam in Europe. It was actually really sad, hard to hold the tears as one sister (from Holland, convert to Islam) told her own story of how she would remove her scarf everyday when she entered work, so she would be left to wear only an allowed small headband just covering...
03/13/08 -
ICT4PEACE - To denounce government censorship of the Internet and to demand more online freedom, Reporters Without Borders is calling on Internet users to come and protest in online versions of nine countries that are Internet enemies during the 24 hours from 11 a.m. tomorrow, 12 March, to 11 a.m. on 13 March (Paris time, GMT +1). ...
03/12/08 -
Green Leap Forward - The central government, with Pan Yue (??) of China’s State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) as its fearless green leader, has enacted a cyclone of green policies dubbed the “Green Whirlwinds”, coinciding with the “peaceful rise” of SEPA to a ministry-level administrative organ. Here’s a brief summary of the green credit, green insurance, green securities and green trade...
03/12/08 -
Steve en Ulrike - Today we see how the real situation is in Tibet. The day seems to be silent and peacefull, even boring. Until 6 o´clock. then 100s of Tibetans gather together on the Bakhor Square. They form a strong, silent, peacefull circle around the police who keep the middle of the square open. Soon they call for backup....
03/12/08 -
American Thinker - From the Egyptian border breach to indiscriminate rocket fire at Israel, the Gaza Strip currently poses serious threats to regional security. The Hamas terrorist organization controls this territory because it defeated the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in a six-day Palestinian civil war in June 2007....
03/12/08 -
Crownmeking81 - I can't think of a better start to my day then to read about an individual who decides to stand up to the status quo and put themselves on the line for freedom and equality. This woman, Wajeha Al-Huwaider, has posted a video of herself driving a car in Saudi Arabia on YouTube, which is a clear violation of Saudi law. Today is Women's Day in Saudi Arabia, and she has taken this occasion to beseech...
03/12/08 -
Impunity Watch - The trial of former Croatian generals Ante Gotovina, Ivan Cermak, and Mladen Markac began at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal today. The three generals stand accused of orchestrating the killing of hundreds of Serbians and the forced expulsion of thousands during a three-day military campaign to retake Krajina in August 1995, known as "Operation Storm." All three have pled not guilty to accusations...
03/12/08 -
Boycott 2008 Communist Olympics - I believe that the Olympic Games in Beijing will be hugely successful and absolutely trouble-free. The reason I say that is because China is working like crazy to iron out a few rough spots, because I'm an optimistic person and because I don't want to be identified by Chinese officials as a bad guy and have my media village pillow-mint privileges suspended this August....
03/11/08 -
Hot Air - The city of Lahore has a reputation as the cultural center of Pakistan, and until recently, even the jihadists had left it alone. Now, no city in Pakistan can consider itself safe, as two suicide bombers blew up a house and a police headquarters there today, killing 24 and wounding more than 200:...
03/11/08 -
Gay Solidarity - Two Iranian citizens will probably get send back to Iran, even though there life will be in danger if they arrive in their country. Mehdi Kazemi, only 19 years old, recently found out that his partner was executed because of his sexual orientation. Kazemi was studying in London at that time, and besides the horrible news of the death of his partner, he was told that he was on the black list now as...
03/11/08 -
Moneyweb - How can you tell the difference between South Africa and the US of A? New York governor Eliot Spitzer has found himself embroiled in a scandal; apparently he was Client 9 of a high-end prostitution syndicate (see Spitzer engulfed in sex scandal)....
03/10/08 -
Gulf Stream Blues - News came this morning of two big election results in Europe, both won by the slimmest of margins and both reflecting the increasingly polarized nature of their societies. In the first, Malta’s ruling Nationalist party won the weekend’s general election by the slimmest margin in the Mediterranean state’s 40 year history....
03/10/08 -
Siberian Light - In late February it was discovered that India and USA have begun consultation at the high level about question of cooperation in the area of ballistic missile defence. According to a statement by Robert Gates, US Secretary of State for Defense, the question was about US participation in the development of an Indian ballistic missile defence system....
03/10/08 -
My Virtual Tent - Now that the diplomatic crisis in the Andes is over, it’s time for some analysis: what did it all mean? Well, many things. Let’s start from the beginning. Why did Ecuador get ticked off? - Last weekend, Colombian military forces entered Ecuadorian territory in order to kill a prominent member of the Colombian guerrilla organisation FARC, Raúl Reyes, in the border region....
03/09/08 -
FP Watch - One of Putin's major selling points -- and that of his successor, Dmitri Medvedev -- has been the impressive rates of economic growth that have occurred on his watch. In no small measure, these economic successes have helped to bolster Putin's public approval rating to 70-80%, and ensure an easy victory for his party in last year's Duma elections. But most of this boasting is just hot air, with...
03/09/08 -
Eurozone Watch - Last weeks' news about the Eurogroup meeting and the ECB Board meeting revealed a clear rift between the political leaderships in the eurozone and the European Central Bank. For the first time since the euro started its race for ever new historical heights, all Finance Ministers of the Eurozone agreed to voice unanimous and strong concern about this development. Previously, at least the German...
03/09/08 -
Crispin Williams - A feeling of desperation is the only way to sum up the latest episode of clashes between Israel and the Palestinians. Following the latest Israeli incursion into Gaza to suppress rocket fire that had killed 1 Israeli citizen and 2 Israeli soldiers, 120 Palestinians lay dead. Approximately half of these were civilians, with one being a baby girl. Seeming retribution followed in a gun attack on...
03/07/08 -
Contextual Criticism - Nobody seems to know exactly how many Christians there are in Iraq -- I've seen figures ranging from 550,000 to 750,000. It's probably somewhere in between. They are a small percentage of the population, however, maybe two or two and a half percent....
03/07/08 -
Douglas Farah - Viktor Bout, the subject of my book with Steve Braun has been arrested in Thailand on charges of supplying weapons to the FARC in Colombia. It is a stunning blow to the world’s “Merchant of Death,” who has been responsible for fanning wars across Africa, as well as aiding and abetting the Taliban, and thus, indirectly, al Qaeda....
03/07/08 -
Byzantine Sacred Art Blog - It is no longer a secret that unilateral declaration of independence by the Pristina separatists and subsequent lightening-quick illegal recognition of Serbia's severed Kosovo-Metohia province by Washington, Brussels, Berlin, Paris, London et al has, as predicted, opened the Pandora's Box of secessionists seeking recognitions for their own self-proclaimed turfs, within other internationally recognized...
03/06/08 -
EU Referendum - There is a sort of a joke about political, social and academic meetings to do with Balkan countries and regions that all you have to say is “Macedonia. What do you think?” to start a fracas that may well lead to fisticuffs....
03/06/08 -
Siberian Light - Dmitry Medvedev is Russia’s new President. But what kind of President will he be? Will he wield actual power, or will he just be the right hand man of outgoing President Vladimir Putin? Does the Bear have the stamina to survive in the bear-pit of Russian politics?...
03/06/08 -
Opalo's Weblog - The official opening of Kenya’s tenth parliament took place on Thursday afternoon amid high expectations of national reconciliation and healing. The president’s speech laid emphasis on the need to urgently amend the constitution in order to create the constitutional framework for the implementation of the deal that he signed a week ago with arch-rival Raila Odinga (It is important to note that...
03/05/08 -
Kabobfest - Things are getting back to normal in Gaza after Israel decided to pause its Shoah while Condoleeza Rice visits the region and blames the Palestinians for the 125 deaths they suffered at the hands of Israel’s army this week. By normal I mean that Israeli airstrikes killed three Palestinians today....
03/05/08 -
Caracas Chronicles - Venezuelan President Chávez recently announced that he was deploying thousands of soldiers to the border after Colombia bombed a FARC base in Ecuadorian territory. His government also announced the land border would be closed to all traffic, and expelled all Colombian Embassy officials while it announced it was bringing home all personnel from the Venezuelan Embassy in Colombia....
03/05/08 -
Eurozone Watch - While the German government and German economists do not even dare seriously thinking about economic stimulus packages (with some rare exceptions - see Ulrich Fritsche's post), some other European countries are moving quickly ahead. In most crisis scenarios for European countries with real estate bubbles to burst such as Spain or the Baltics, economists now argue that the downturn will not be...
03/04/08 -
Windows to Russia - Like we reported the Russian elections were given a clean bill of health and even though they may not have been too exciting! They cost much less than the 3/4 of a Billion Dollars that the American elections have spent so far! The people are happy, government is happy & Putin is happy! (Not sure if Medvedev is happy yet) Russia's presidential elections were held in line with international standards,...
03/04/08 -
Justice for All - Feb 26th, 2008, Reuters reported, “YouTube outage might have been caused by Pakistan.” The same night, news of YouTube being shut down was discussed on every major network, speculating whether the Pakistani government was responsible. YouTube executives didn’t call it censorship, explaining the shutdown was the result of a routing change creating a massive traffic jam and “many users around...
03/04/08 -
boinboing - The Question Box is a project from UC Berkeley's Rose Shuman to bring some of the benefits of the information on the Internet to places that are too remote or poor to sustain a live Internet link. It works by installing a single-button intercom in the village that is linked to a nearby town where there is a computer with a trained, live operator. Questioners press the intercom, describe their query...
03/03/08 -
china economic review - Beijing’s attempts to rein in bank lending have focused in part on stemming the flow of money into real estate developments. The problem here is not so much the large-scale, listed developers that have long-term strategies and increasingly diversified portfolios; it is the smaller and less reliable players....
03/03/08 -
John Esposito - The politicization of scholars, experts and media commentators post 9/11 has created a minefield for policymakers and the general public. Many are caught between the contending positions of seemingly qualified experts as well as a new cadre of Islamophobic authors and their revisionist readings of Islam and Islamic history. Today, we now have a new empirically grounded tool that enables us to go...
03/03/08 -
Dexter Thillien - Firstly there is a personality clash between Chancellor Merkel and President Sarkozy. For the Germans, Sarkozy is seen as too much in the public eye while Merkel has a much more discreet persona, but what hasn’t especially been liked, and not just by the Germans, has been the fact that Sarkozy has been taking EU success as his own, especially in the case of the Lisbon Treaty or the release of the...
03/02/08 -
terror wonk - Reyes, who’s birth name was Luis Edgar Devia Silva, was the FARC’s chief ideologue and voice to the outside world. He was the first member of the FARC secretariat to be killed. The internal affairs of the FARC are opaque, but Reyes was frequently described as the number two in the FARC hierarchy after Manuel Marulanda, who is in his late 70s and is rumored to be ill. In the FARC’s hierarchy...
03/02/08 -
Tarek Rizk - It was this bit of branding talk that draw me in, and I wish now my eye had kept moving. Cohen anecdotally concludes that a lack European enthusiasm for the NATO mission is somehow traceable to their short memory and a shocking disregard for the impact of the London and Madrid bombings. The European governments are understandably unenthusiastic about cleaning up the mess left behind when the US took...
03/02/08 -
FP Watch - The Syrian town along the border, Qunetra, is a wasteland. No one lives there. Instead, the Syrians have largely left it unchanged since the Israelis destroyed it in 1967. Houses are down, buildings have huge holes in them, and the place is eerily quiet. When I requested to visit the city, I was treated with intense suspicion and only able to...
02/29/08 -
Janet Ritz - A year ago, a friend who'd heard that I'd spent time with the Kurds asked me, 'who are they?' That query led to this post. After reading Blake Fleetwood's post with Bill Clinton's statement regarding the need for troops in the Kurdish north because Turkey doesn't "like the fact that the PKK guerrillas sometimes come across into northern Iraq and hide after staging attacks in Turkey" and the news...
02/29/08 -
Tim Worstall - A tiny story that most newspapers would bury below the fold on B17 has an interesting, if uncomfortable message for trade protectionists. Chinese trade with Europe is about to be revolutionized by the rebirth of the old overland silk route - this time via rail....
02/29/08 -
infowars - Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai has provoked outrage after threatening Palestinians with a "holocaust." Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai has provoked outrage after threatening Palestinians with a "holocaust," but the same media who obsessed about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s "wipe Israel off the map" misquote are scurrying to defend Vilnai’s disgraceful...
02/28/08 -
avuncular american - "Downhill" in the West Bank is usually the direction that Israeli settlers look. They - along with Israeli Army outposts - occupy the high ground, and increasingly, the preponderance of the territory's water resources. Essa and Snowdon start out with a scene filmed through their car's windshield, driving through a welcome West Bank rain. But they point out that even the raindrops do not belong...
02/28/08 -
Steven M. Warshawsky - A few days ago, John McCain remarked to reporters that to win the upcoming election, he must convince the American people that the current strategy in Iraq is succeeding. If he can't do this, he admitted, "then I lose. I lose." While McCain quickly backed away from his stark political analysis, he conceded that the war "will be a significant factor in how the American people judge my candidacy."...
02/28/08 -
Counterterrorism Blog - A few weeks ago while conducting research for a client; I came across a newspaper article from Toronto that immediately caught my attention. It reported the arrest of four men on charges of debit and credit card fraud for possessing numerous gift cards containing bank account and debit information from individuals in the United Kingdom (U.K.). Further investigation found laptop computers and memory...
02/27/08 -
Eurozone Watch - Just coming back from a short holiday in Spain, I am now more confident than ever that the Iberian economy is heading for a nasty period of adjustment. Even though growth in Q4 of last year surprised on the upside (0.8 percent quarter-on-quarter compared to 0.4 percent in the euro area as a whole), it already feels like a recession in Spain. Unemployment has risen by about half a percentage point...
02/27/08 -
notboss - Just as there are no free lunches, there are no truly free markets. Any vendor who buys you lunch or participates in a market is always looking for an advantage. Competition makes markets the vibrant and innovative places we want them to be. But paradoxically, when competitors succeed in developing competitive advantages they start to threaten market openness and competition. In software markets,...
02/27/08 -
Shashank Bengali - It was nice to see former Secretary-General Kofi Annan this morning at a press conference in Nairobi. Annan (at right in a Reuters photo) looked sharp as usual, in a charcoal suit and crimson tie. Most importantly, he didn't look tired, which means that maybe he's not quite ready to leave Kenya yet. Because it's starting to seem like his presence is one of the few things keeping this place from...
02/26/08 -
Hannah Allam - Broadly, the polls have been described as a referendum on the popularity of President Ahmadinejad, whose administration has been marked by U.S.-led concern over Iran's nuclear program, prisoner abuse allegations, the closure of independent media outlets, a crackdown on citizens who don't strictly observe Islamic dress, the arrests of Iranian-American intellectuals on suspicion of espionage, and,...
02/26/08 -
Mustafa Akyol - It is striking to hear this comment especially these days, because “the Islamists” that have been “kept in check by a modern elite” for decades have just taken a few more bold steps to make Turkey a liberal democracy. The members of the “Islamist” AKP (Justice and Development Party) have just passed the Foundations law, which gives our non-Muslim minorities the rights that the Turkish...
02/26/08 -
Andrew Sullivan - That's all. Yes: almost everything remains to be done. Note also the Bush-like tendency to reduce the most intractable questions - questions that have never, ever been resolved in centuries - to simple topic sentences, as if writing these goals on a piece of paper makes them any less delusional. "Resolve the 'federalism' issue through peaceful referendums." Okay. "Develop truly capable Iraqi Army."...
02/26/08 -
pajamasmedia - In 1991, as the Balkans were disintegrating, the then-Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, Jacques Poos, proclaimed: “This is the hour of Europe. It is not the hour of the Americans.” It was (presumably) his way of saying that European governments had a responsibility to intervene in a crisis that threatened the stability of Europe. But Europeans, paralyzed by their divisions, were unable to...
02/26/08 -
poligazette - tories about North Korea usually focus on its nuclear program. But Perhaps they should start focusing more on what we will do when the place falls apart.To be sure, the nuclear program is a huge part of the problem. A collapse of the government in North Korea would potentially release onto the international black market vast quantities of nuclear technology, at a primitive but nonetheless deadly...
02/26/08 -
Pharmalot - As Bangkok’s newly installed government reviews the policy to issue compulsory licenses for several widely used medications, Gretchen Hamel, a spokeswoman for the US Trade Rep says the office is, indeed, taking a close look at Thailand’s actions. The move comes after reports that drugmakers and biotechs have been urging the US Trade Rep to downgrade Thailand’s status. “We are disappointed...
02/24/08 -
All Things Pakistan - Much has been said on how the election results are a referendum against the policies of General Musharraf. While there can be little disagreement with this, there is a clear lesson for Pakistan’s urban intelligentsia that had been screaming about the futility of this election. True, Pakistan’s troubled polity will not transform overnight, nor will the endemic civil-military imbalance dissipate...
02/22/08 -
Sabrina Workman - The reasoning behind the last fuel tax increase was that it ’sent the right environmental signals in our fight against climate change’. Climate change is used to justify various policies that usually involve saving money or creating extra money for the government or local councils, such as the reduction of rubbish bin pick-ups in some local councils to alternating weeks for recycling and ordinary...
02/22/08 -
Steve LeVine - When it comes to oligarchs, Vladimir Putin is a choosy ruler. He likes some, he hates some, and sometimes an oligarch can move from one to the other category with some dispatch. So was the fate of Mikhail Gutseriev, who until recently was head of a Russian oil company called Russneft. Putin decided that he wanted one of his favored oligarchs, Oleg Deripaska, to take over the company. Gutseriev...
02/22/08 -
Brad Sester - And, more broadly, can China sustain a gradual pace of RMB appreciation? Or even a a gradual pace of appreciation against basket, not just the dollar, as Li Yang has suggested? Or does an expected , gradual appreciation invite unlimited inflows and thus pose impossible-to-solve problems for a "stretched" central bank, leaving only one way out -- a large one-off revaluation?...
02/21/08 -
immanent Frame - In Turkey, the recent parliamentary vote put an end to the headscarf ban, but not to the public controversy that has severely divided and deeply polarized Turkish society since the post-1980 period. The battle in the public sphere continues among groups with different interpretations of secularism, but also among women themselves. As the most visible symbol of Islamization for the last three decades,...
02/21/08 -
John Quiggin - Most long-lived dictatorships have at least some positive achievements, and, the world being what it is, most dictators have some unattractive enemies. These facts have generated a couple of marathon threads here, following Chris post’ on Castro and mine on Suharto** , not to mention vast numbers on Saddam. Then there’s Algeria and Pakistan, where dictatorial governments have had plenty of...
02/21/08 -
Globalization Blog - Much is made, and rightly so, of the way in which the currently poor economies lack the technology of the richer ones. Sometimes referred to as the Digital Divide, this technological gap is hugely important: for of course, it is technological advance that enables the growth out of poverty. If we define technology widely (including methods of organisation etc) then the application of technology is...
02/21/08 -
Daniel Duquenal - Today there are a few recent articles worth noting in El Universal. The first one tells us that the very own government numbers speak of a 0.2% growth in the agricultural PIB for 2005-2006. This at a time where the economy was growing by a 10%, courtesy of the import boom due to high oil prices. That is, as it has been pointed out often enough in this page, the economy grew because imports grew and...
02/21/08 -
the monkey cage - In case you don’t know about the Freedom House ratings, here’s a little background. Every year since 1972, Freedom House has issued an annual report on the global status of democracy. In a nutshell, every country is categorized annually as “free,” “partially free,” or “not free,” depending on where it stands on the two dimensions of political rights and civil liberties. (These...
02/21/08 -
John Rosenthal - Municipal elections are upcoming in France in the next weeks. A front-page headline on the subject in the weekend edition (Feb. 17-18) of the daily Le Monde would undoubtedly shock many readers of traditional English-language new sources. "Municipal Elections," it reads, "Banlieues on the Right, Downtown on the Left." Banlieues on the Right? The very word "banlieues" became widely-known to English...
02/20/08 -
spying bad things - In 2005 the Indonesian government confirmed in principle approval for four 1000 MWe units on the Muria peninsula, 450 km east of Jakarta in central Java, with a view to commissioning the first in 2016 and the last in 2025. The Indonesian Government made an earlier attempt (in 1995) to commence a reactor program in Muria but shelved these plans due to public environmental opposition and the Asian...
02/20/08 -
Hannah Lucinda Smith - So it’s finally happened: 11 years after ethnic tension exploded into ethnic conflict and cleansing, 9 years after the UN intervened to keep the peace, Kosovo has become an independent nation state. There was jubilation on the streets of Pristina following Prime Minister Hashim Thaci’s long awaited announcement; a stark contrast to the angry Serbian crowds who threw rocks at the American Embassy...
02/20/08 -
Shashank Bengali - The Rwandan capital is home to about 1 million people but it has the feel of a small town, with orderly, tree-lined streets that meet at intersections where drivers use their turn signals more than their horns. The guys hawking cell phone airtime run up to you and wave the scratch cards in your face, but they plead for a sale with their eyes, not their lungs....
02/19/08 -
Russia Blog - While President Putin has been a harsh critic of the war in Iraq and U.S. plans to build a missile defense system in Eastern Europe, he has steadfastly refused to criticize President Bush's competence or good faith. Speaking about the current occupant of the White House, Putin said, "Sometimes you have to make decisions that nobody else can make...do you think Bush has it easy?" A reporter asked...
02/19/08 -
Opinio Juris - It takes little courage to be a blogger in the United States. Perhaps professional reputation is at risk if things go badly, but there is little more to fear than that. Sure, every intellectual community has its village idiot, and the blogosphere is one of the easiest places to find people who crave attention and lack discretion. But the rashness of a buffoon hardly qualifies as courage. I suppose...
02/19/08 -
concurring opinions - First, the moral authority question. The charged Rwandans were not responsible for the 1994 Rwandan genocide (Hutus killing Tutsis), but for acts by Tutsi-led rebels who defeated the Hutu extremists responsible for the genocide. Certainly, these soldiers should be held responsible for violations of international criminal law in their efforts to end the overwhelming violence perpetrated in Rwanda --...
02/18/08 -
Counterterrorism Blog - The Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) is actually a misnomer. It does not promote the sanctity of bank records as its name suggests. Rather, the statute enlists banks as the eyes and ears of the government in its efforts to prevent criminals from availing themselves of the civilized world’s financial system. It does this by defining the circumstances in which banks are required to report customer activity...
02/18/08 -
lawhawk - China is now complaining about a planned US mission to destroy a satellite that is schedule to reenter the Earth's atmosphere in early March before it could potentially expose people to a dangerous chemical on board (not to mention allow potentially sensitive US technology to fall to the Earth where it might be collected by enemies of the US). China carried out an anti-satellite missile test...
02/18/08 -
FP Watch - Yeltsin's government had tried to put an end to prisoner mistreatment. Yet the Putin administration, without directly authorizing it, has essentially adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" policy that allows for prison directors to quietly institutionalize such abuse. As the co-founder of the Foundation for Defense of Rights of Prisoners, Lev Ponomarev, has suggested: "...when Putin came to power, a new...
02/15/08 -
Crooked Timber - Given the vagueness of boundaries, the best definition I’ve been able to come up with is the following. Anyone who has a credible chance of being able to publish a single authored article in one of a small number of key journals qualifies as a member of the foreign policy community. The list of journals would certainly include Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy ; I think that there is a strong...
02/15/08 -
globalisation blog - Perhaps the most controversial part of globalisation is the bit about the freedom of movement of labour. Free movement of goods (despite some tariffs) and capital are pretty much the order of the day, to the enrichment of us all. But that free movement of labour still hasn't arrived, at least not globally. We have had such though within the European Union in recent years and there's been a...
02/15/08 -
Roger Kimball - What is it about the Brits and free speech? Why do they hate it so? They didn’t used to. But nowadays their libel laws muzzle domestic criticism of radical Islam and have even sought to muzzle American authors making such criticisms. The Archbishop of Canterbury thinks that Britain needs new laws to prevent “thoughtless and cruel” speech. Really? What about people, like His Grace, who advocate...
02/15/08 -
Daniel Duquenal - Chavez must start regretting a little bit his praise words toward the FARC. This is only resulting in an increased scrutiny of the FARC activities inside Venezuela by the press. And the Chavez administration is not looking good at all. In fact, in his latest article Juan Forero barely stops himself from accusing chavismo to be collaborating deliberately with the FARC business inside Venezuela. It...
02/15/08 -
randyelrod - Ugandan President Musveni was the first African leader to proclaim HIV/Aids a problem and therefore paved the way for funding. British tax funds provided seed money for the clinic and ongoing operation funds are provided by donors such as Compassion International. It is a Christian based clinic but is open to all. They currently have 10,000 active patients. All services are free and the current...
02/15/08 -
the whitepath - Turkey's own ?new class? is in power for a long time, and thus is more appropriately named nowadays as the ?old elite.? The things they label as ?counter-revolution? are nothing but the expansion of rights and freedoms. They love to depict their political opponents as ?traitors,? or, in the case of religious conservatives, as wild-eyed, Taliban-like fanatics. (This sometimes plays well to international...
02/13/08 -
FP Watch - Syria is engaged in a renewed crackdown on political dissent, culminating with the recent detention of Riad Seif (left), a prominent opposition leader. This won't be the first time that Seif's been in jail - in 2001, he and several other pro-democracy advocates were thrown into prison for five-year terms, effectively ending a period of political openness known as the "Damascus Spring." No doubt to...
02/13/08 -
China Law Blog - I do not think it a mistake for US companies to target China's elites, at least initially. I also do not think it a mistake for US companies to seek the high road both in terms of their image and in terms of the way they conduct business. If US companies cannot make it in China taking the high road, I have serious doubts they can make it by taking the low road. US companies need to use their strengths...
02/13/08 -
Robert O. Freedman - The government of Ehud Olmert has utilized a series of measures to try to stop the rocket fire. Olmert and his Defense Minister, Labor Party leader Ehud Barak, have regularly sent in army troops to hit Hamas and Islamic Jihad forces in Gaza near the Israeli border; it has used the Israeli Air Force to hit Palestinian teams firing rockets (or about to fire rockets, or returning from firing rockets);...
02/12/08 -
Michael Totten - The local police force would collapse in short order without American financial and logistics support. “The biggest problem they have is supply,” Corporal Hayes said to me in Fallujah. “They're always running out of gas and running out of bullets. How are they supposed to police this city with no gas and no bullets?” What they need more than anything else, though, in the long run anyway,...
02/12/08 -
Derek Barry - With former PM John Howard refusing to say sorry, Kevin Rudd made a public apology an election commitment. However the new Prime Minister had faced criticism for delaying the release of the text of the apology. His argument was he had to consult with Aboriginal group to make sure it was right. Opposition leader Brendan Nelson has confirmed the Coalition will give its bipartisan support to the apology...
02/12/08 -
Hannah Allam - In a place as diverse and cosmopolitan as Dubai -- home to about 180 nationalities -- English is the lingua franca. But it's not the English you hear on newscasts; this city-state has developed its own Persian Gulf patois that reflects the polyglot communities residing here. Dubai-speak is sprinkled with corporate jargon, South Asian inflections, guttural Russian, acronyms for everything, cheeky...
02/12/08 -
transatlantic politics - Romania's recent achievements are impressive. They include NATO membership in 2004, EU membership in 2007, and eight years of solid economic growth that have refashioned the country into a modern democracy and a market economy. Romania is a country of enormous promise and potential with a marketplace of 22 million consumers. It is rich in agricultural lands, energy and mineral resources, and human...
02/12/08 -
Econbrowser - Satellite O'er the Desert is produced by someone calling himself "Joules Burn" (who says scientists lack a sense of humor)? JB was inspired by the careful effort by Oil Drum's Stuart Staniford to sift through the limited information publicly available to try to ascertain the current production status of Ghawar, the world's greatest oil field, which in recent years has accounted for perhaps 6% of...
02/12/08 -
Social Europe Blog - The European Social Model (ESM) in its most basic sense is best understood as a Europe-wide shared political value and aspiration based on the notion of ecological and social sustainability. It acknowledges that the conservation of human livelihood and the protection from life risks – such as ill health, unemployment and old age – are indispensable requirements for a good society. The implementation...
02/10/08 -
immanent Frame - In Turkey there is now a great deal of controversy about proposed revisions to the constitution that would include lifting the ban on the wearing of Islamic headscarves in universities. Many commentators have taken this to be an ominous sign of the intention of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul, who represent the Justice and Development Party (AKP), to undermine Turkey’s...
02/10/08 -
Dion Nissenbaum - Set aside for a moment the circuitous, overly cautious final report: Return once again to the days of the war. Recall the moments of anxiety, the sense of widening cracks, when it suddenly became clear to each and every one of us that the army may not always have the power to rescue us, that maybe once it could end differently. After all, this is what suddenly trickled between the tightly fastened...
02/10/08 -
Oil & glory - Iran is in the grip of an energy crisis that has left homes without heating and electricity, forced the temporary shut-down of power plants, and even led National Iranian Oil Co to stop re-injecting gas into its onshore oilfields. How could this happen in a country with the world's second-largest oil and gas reserves, you might ask? First, this year's winter has been the coldest in a half century;...
02/08/08 -
poligazette - Few individuals in Turkey or beyond lack an opinion about the AKP’s proposal to give young women attending university the legal right to wear head scarves in university facilities. The mere political progress made by this reform convinces many of the country’s secular citizens that their country is five years away from resembling Iran - a type of doomsday “back to the future” scenario...
02/08/08 -
Social Europe Blog - The French Presidency of the EU this year is a significant opportunity to resolve these important questions. Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed an updated European Security Strategy, and Britain must help shape what goes in it. Above all else, Brown and Miliband need to ensure that this strategy answers boldly the key question: 'when will EU military force be used?' A new strategy must make the case...
02/08/08 -
Dipnote - We evacuated dependents and children on Saturday before the start of the war. They left at 4:00 AM and the war started around 9:00 AM. The Department of Defense element came to the compound to secure it. We were all divided into 2 groups. One group with the Ambassador was at the embassy, and the other group was on the U.S. housing compound. We were all put in one room, and the 11 of us were right...
02/07/08 -
ALL THINGS PAKISTAN - Perhaps not so much for the actual damage they render to the suffering individual but for the other spin-off consequences that result as a direct cause of mental problems. The shame associated with mental illness, even if just depression, permeates every class of the society indiscriminately and the women are the worst casualties of it. Estimates put the figure of the total mentally ill at 14...
02/07/08 -
the white path - Any quick history of Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, will surely include the institutions he created, from İş Bank to Ankara University to the ideology that bears his name. But who knew the story of the little church that he created until it found itself entangled in the alleged ultra-nationalist criminal gang called “Ergenekon”? This group of about three dozen nationalist figures,...
02/07/08 -
Russia Blog - U.S. nuclear power reactors will be able to obtain more supplies of Russian enriched uranium for fuel, under a trade deal signed by the two countries late on Friday, February 1, 2008. The agreement will provide U.S. utilities with a reliable supply of nuclear fuel by allowing Russia to boost exports to the United States while minimizing any disruption to the U.S. domestic enrichment industry. "The...
02/06/08 -
Effect Measure - The mass poisoning that is occurring in West Bengal and Bangladesh is another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Drinking water is one of the most important resources for any community and the government with the aid and encouragement of international intergovernmental, non-profit and governmental aid organizations began to supply the poorest in the population with a source of groundwater...
02/06/08 -
Tim Worstall - Fertility is falling, literacy rates have risen tremendously, both contributing to the demographic transition so that the population bomb argument is near irrelevant now....but there is one critique that might carry some weight. That globalisation is increasing inequality. Now I, as a personal matter, don't worry too much about inequality, thinking that the alleviation of absolute poverty is our...
02/06/08 -
Publius Pundit - Economic attainment not only places Russia at a woefully inferior standard of living, but prevents it from matching the other G-8 nations in military expenditures as well. Russia's level of democracy is also, of course, abysmally lower than that of the other G-8 nations, as repeatedly confirmed by international ratings agencies, and it has a hostile relationship with NATO, of which all other members...
02/05/08 -
transatlantic politics - Coupled with a non-united Europe and the fading influence of the US State Department in Eastern Europe, Vladimir Putin strikes again today on the energy front by securing a deal on the South Stream gas pipeline with Bulgaria, one of his closest allies and also dubbed "Russia's trojan horse in the EU". During his final visit as Russia's President to a foreign country, Putin managed to get Bulgaria...
02/05/08 -
FP Watch - Previous sanctions, admittedly much weaker in design than they could be and even weaker in implementation, have not had the intended result of forcing a suspension of uranium enrichment at Natanz. The latest assembled package promises only a bit more bite, proposing to "authorize inspections of air and sea cargo going in and out of Iran" and deepening the travel ban and asset freeze of individuals...
02/05/08 -
Brad Sester - The part about the rising importance of government-controlled funds is hard to dispute, especially given their role in the recapitalization of the US financial system. But I would argue that the rise of sovereign wealth funds -- and more generally, the rise of what Martin Wolf called "state capitalism" -- is the almost inevitable result of the state's leading role in the current process of globalization,...
02/04/08 -
Michael Totten - The United States military plans to formally hand over Anbar Province to the Iraqis this spring because the insurgency truly is finished in that part of the country. Most Americans have heard about the success in this province by now, but few seem to be aware that the cities of Anbar were the scenes of the most ferocious fighting: Ramadi, Haditha, and – worst of all – Fallujah. The Americans...
02/04/08 -
Ahmadinejad - One's perspective regarding government and governance determines the way one ‎should cooperate with the people. If one recognizes government as a privilege and prey ‎of the governors, then the period of governance can be counted as an opportunity to fulfill ‎the expectations of certain individuals and groups or the ostentation and hedonism of the ‎governors.‎ But if in our view,...
02/04/08 -
SIG III - Kenya provides a great individual case study of the African blogosphere, as there has been a lot happening there in terms of developing Internet access and localized Kenyan content in 2007. Despite halting progress, The Kenyan government is working on securing more widespread Internet access through an undersea fiberoptic cable, and has received money from the World Bank to facilitate this connection...
02/03/08 -
Transatlantic Politics - Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, loves to outsource some of its industries to the much cheaper Eastern European countries. Its half socialist, half conservative and free trade supporting government allegedly understands the importance of freedom. Freedom of movement, freedom of investing, freedom of relocating. Beautiful principles, as long as they don’t affect German workers. Especially West...
02/03/08 -
the oil drum - Let us venture into a political no-go zone and say that at some point in the not too distant future there is a bitter pill that we will need to swallow and we are getting just a foretaste with the current energy crisis. In a nutshell, our global growth based economic model is fundamentally unsustainable. This is not a new idea, but one that dates back to the early 1970s. At that time there was...
02/03/08 -
FP Watch - IR professor Seth Weinberger, writing at his always-informative blog, argues that the UN's Darfur mission is -- quite unsurprisingly -- failing badly. With a highly obstructionist Sudanese government, unreliable African Union forces, and limited international commitment, peacekeeping forces (a joint AU-UN operation) have been unable to effectively end the violence. As Weinberger notes, the UN is in...
02/02/08 -
Bruce Falconer - Afghanistan. In the 1980s, we sent in the CIA, gave weapons to the mujahideen, and defeated the Soviets. In the 1990s, we got out, allowed our erstwhile allies to kill each other, and sat by as the country was taken over by religious fanatics and terrorists. After 9/11, we realized our mistake, went back in, chased Al Qaeda and the Taliban out of their caves, and declared victory. Afterward, we...
02/02/08 -
Daniel Duquenal - Yesterday we got yet another proof that the Venezuelan judicial system has become simply another repressive arm of the regime. In fact, as we have often discussed in this page the closest branch of the Venezuelan government to a dictatorial situation is the judicial system. The evidence we discussed on and off is as follows, in no particular order: - justices chanting "Uh! Ah! Chavez no se va!"...
02/02/08 -
michaelyon - 4 Rifles launched a “trigger op” later that night, a simple operation designed to interdict smugglers. The vast area is so heavily mined that going just a few feet off the road can be fatal. Much of the smuggling is apparently happening on the nearby Shat al Arab River, the seizure of which had been one of Saddam’s prime excuses for launching one of the largest and longest-running conventional...
01/31/08 -