Geography Archives: Asia

In October 2023, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published its annual Trade and Development Report. Nothing in the report came as a major surprise. The growth of the global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) continues to decline with no sign of a rebound.

Western currencies have almost been completely phased out in Russia-China trade, as nearly all payments between the countries are now carried out in rubles and yuan, according to Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.

Attacks on the progressive Indian news outlet NewsClick coincided with the suspension of 141 opposition members of Indian parliament, both constituting serious attacks on Indian democracy.

The Singaporean shipping company, ONE, declares that it would be ceasing all shipments to the Occupation’s ports, according to reports by Israeli media.

The murky background of the likely next President of Indonesia may come to haunt Indonesia, and Australia.

The basic theme is to suggest that under neo-liberalism there has been such an acceleration of the growth rate of Gross Domestic Product that the people as a whole have become much better off, and vast masses of them have been lifted out of poverty (one particular enthusiast has even claimed that poverty now afflicts only 2 per cent of the population).

The Asia-Pacific region has once again become a hotspot in Washington’s new Cold War, as Biden’s Indo-Pacific Strategy has been dead set on forging a new anti-China bloc across the region.

The Biden Administration extols the Camp David Agreement as a qualitative leap forward in the US, Japan, and South Korea military cooperation.

Adivasis (literally, “original inhabitants”, equivalent to “indigenous peoples”) have been and are being sacrificed in the union government’s uranium mining and processing projects in what is now the State of Jharkhand, earlier the State of Bihar, where the public enterprise, Uranium Corporation of India Ltd (UCIL) began underground uranium mining and processing plant, twenty-four km west of Jaduguda.

U.S. President Joe Biden’s Indo-Pacific Framework for Prosperity (IPEF) is the economic arm of his administration’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, aimed at countering China’s influence in the region.

At the conclusion of the Second World War, debates raged on how best to regulate the destructive power of the atom.

While handing over tax concessions to capitalists to ‘promote employment’, the Centre is not spending to fill the large number of government vacancies, or on MGNREGS.

The cost-of-living crisis on top of the extreme exploitative conditions of the garment industry has erupted into a major outbreak of workers’ unrest, reports John Clarke.

The Israeli Builders Association plan to hire 50,000-100,000 Indian workers to replace 90,000 Palestinian workers who lost their work permits.

Significant segments of the non-Communist Western Left see the developing contradiction between the United States and China in terms of an inter-imperialist rivalry.

“It became evident to U.S. officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign,” The New York Times reported on Monday.

I reject the allegation of fraudulent infusion of funds through a “complex web of several entities”, as mentioned in the Delhi Police FIR and in the New York Times article, says the American millionaire.

Israel is ethnically cleansing Palestinians, trying to force them out of Gaza into Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The U.S. and EU support Netanyahu’s scorched-earth war on the “entire nation”, and the State Department ordered diplomats not to call for peace, de-escalation, or a ceasefire.

The central government’s hounding of Newsclick reminds one of the children’s story about a tiger and a goat drinking water from the same stream.

On 3 October, the homes and offices of over one hundred journalists and researchers across India were raided by the Delhi Police, which is under the jurisdiction of the country’s Ministry of Home Affairs.