Geography Archives: Asia

The Consumer Price Index rose 0.1 percent in September as consumer energy price inflation slowed to 0.7 percent after gains of 2.6 and 2.3 percent in July and August.  Overall prices have grown at a 2.7 percent annualized rate over the last three months.  The core CPI remained unchanged over the month and has now […]

By the greater use of compulsory licenses, Brazil could lower drug costs not only in Brazil, but in developing countries overall.  At a time when the New York Times is reporting that “the global battle against AIDS is falling apart for lack of money,” it is absolutely essential that the price of lifesaving medicines in […]

October 13, 2010 Twenty years ago, Harvard’s Joseph Nye famously coined the term “soft power” to describe what he saw as an increasingly important factor in international politics — the capacity of “getting others to want what you want,” which he contrasted with the ability to coerce others through the exercise of “hard” military and/or […]

Who was on the aircraft firing the missile?  Nobody. Who got killed?  A nobody. Eneko Las Heras, born in Caracas in 1963, is a cartoonist based in Spain.  This cartoon was first published on his blog . . . Y sin embargo se mueve on 11 October 2010.  Translation by Yoshie Furuhashi (@yoshiefuruhashi | yoshie.furuhashi […]

The past decade has been one in which export-led economic strategies have come to be seen as the most successful, driven by the apparent success of two countries in particular — China and Germany.  In fact, the export-driven model of growth has much wider prevalence as it was adopted by almost all developing countries. This […]

Laal dedicates this song to the diversity, plurality, and all the colours of Islam. “When the Taliban attacked the shrines of Rahman Baba, Data Sahib, and Abdullah Ghazi Shah, slaughtering hundreds who had gathered for alms or to pray, Laal felt obligated to not only defend the progressive aspects of sufi thought but to discover […]

  Overlooked in the recent rise of the Tea Party and the Republican Right is the way these groups have learned how to grow and thrive on the failures of capitalism.  The Democrats, in contrast, remain tied to its successes.  With capitalism performing particularly poorly at present, it is no wonder that the Right is […]

What does the USA have in common with China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea?  You would hardly guess, but the European Parliament stated loud and all too clear on October 2nd: those are the countries which put lots of people to death.  In a long, detailed resolution, approved almost unanimously by 574 members […]

There are three obvious problems with the Allahabad High Court judgment on the Babri Masjid issue.  Each of them in isolation is potentially damaging for the Constitutional fabric of the country; together they can cause irreparable harm. The first is the obliteration of the distinction between “fact” and “faith”, which represents a serious retrogression to […]

The European tour of Wen Jiabao is taking place while the conflict between the US and China over the yuan/dollar exchange rate is getting worse.  At the same time, a similar if less noisy clash exists between China and the Eurozone countries.  Last but not least, tensions have also arisen in the Sino-Japanese relations following […]

  The 2010 Edward Said Memorial Lecture, the Palestine Center, Washington, DC, 7 October 2010 Thank you all for coming today, and, to those of you who are watching, thank you for viewing this talk.  Those of you who live in Washington, who are subjected to the American media, will probably be relieved to hear […]

The opening section of this note dealing with the most important issue in the current political situation—’the Maoist’ or the Naxal issue—sets the context for the argument that follows, which deals with issues involved in understanding and acting in this situation. I reproduce some key passages, marginally modified and compressed in one case, from my 2008 T. Nagi Reddy Memorial Lecture—now available as Indian Politics Today published by Aakar Books, New Delhi—touching upon these issues; a little reason and ability to interconnect is all that is needed to recognise the issue involved. I conclude with a brief summing up of the argument.

There’s no doubt about it, this is incredible India all right.  Where else in the world would you get Judges of a High Court treating a deity as litigant in a legal case?  And then, because the said deity, otherwise referred to as Ram Lalla in the judgement, is to be treated as a minor […]

It would be hard to find a better test of the integrity of the establishment U.S. media than in their comparative treatment of Iran and Honduras over the past couple of years (2009-2010). Iran has been on the United States’ regime-change hit list for many years.  Since the first-half of 2003 (and overlapping its soon-to-be-discredited […]

Equally at home in Tehran or New York, Hooman Majd benefits from a background as intricately woven as any Persian carpet.  The son of a diplomat under the shah of Iran, Majd attended schools in California, India, Iran, North Africa, and England.  After the tumultuous 1979 Islamic Revolution, return to Iran for Majd and others […]

In recent years, climate change seems to have elbowed out other environmental issues to become the No. 1 global problem.  But the alarming problems of water — increasing scarcity, lack of access to drinking water and sanitation, pollution, flooding — are equally important and an even more immediate threat. On 28 July, the UN General […]

  The free trade push has begun again.  Both U.S. President Barack Obama and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak are calling for ratification of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, which was signed by the two countries’ trade representatives in April 2007 but has yet to be approved by either the U.S. Congress or the South […]

  Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, eds.  Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle.  New York: New York University Press, 2009.  ix + 353 pp.  $79.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8147-8313-9; $25.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8147-8314-6. In the last two decades, a growing field of movement scholarship has complicated conventional representations […]

There are few terms in our political vocabulary as damning as ‘fanatic’.  Beyond tolerance and impervious to communication, the fanatic stands outside the frame of political rationality, possessed by a violent conviction that brooks no argument and will only rest, if ever, once every rival view or way of life is eradicated.  A fanatic, Winston […]

  Part 1 Aijaz Ahmad: Israel, which is completely isolated in the region, is very unhappy about the fact that Turkey is rising as a power which is establishing very productive and extensive contacts in the region.  Israel was very happy when both of them were completely isolated in the region: Turkey was in the […]