Traveling the Pamir Highway, we’re not only facing a geological marvel and a magic trip into ancient history and customs. It’s also a privileged window on a trade revival that will be at the heart of the expansion of the New Silk Roads. Khorog is the only town in the Pamirs – its cultural, economic and educational center, the site of the multi-campus Univers...
This is arguably the ultimate road trip on earth. Marco Polo did it. All the legendary Silk Road explorers did it. Traveling the Pamir Highway back to back, as a harsh winter approaches, able to appreciate it in full, in silence and solitude, offers not only a historical plunge into the intricacies of the ancient Silk Road but a glimpse of what the future ma...
Balochistan, the most restive province of Pakistan, has entered a new era of violence and dissent. Inputs of atrocities being committed on innocent civilians by the Pakistan Army and its sponsored terrorists are coming out frequently despite an attempt to keep the situation under wraps. The root of the problem lies in the fact that the people of...
The Central Bank of Lebanon has again authorized private banks to freely deliver Lebanese pounds, but still no dollars. This exchange control is illegal in law because it has not been validated by Parliament. Several large companies have already filed an application for interim relief before the courts. The wheat, oil and medicine import sectors are out of b...
The international press only remembered the bursts of voices that preceded it and the giggles that punctuated it at the NATO 70th Anniversary Summit in London. The important thing was obviously elsewhere [1]. When it was created, the function of the Atlantic Alliance was summarized by its Secretary General, Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, as “Keeping the Soviet ...
Storied and crowned soccer club Beitar Jerusalem was for decades a pillar of the Israeli right-wing and an often-extreme symbol of Israel’s lurch towards the right as well as its’ ever more uncompromising attitude towards an equitable peace with the Palestinians and approach towards its Israeli Palestinian minority. Today, in an anti-cyclical development, Be...
Let me state my conclusion at the outset. The recent changes in the citizenship law enjoy tremendous support among the ordinary law abiding citizens of the country, except the northeast, which is a special case. The widespread violent protests and agitations in several parts of country are the handiwork of disgruntled parties and leaders facing an existentia...
The demonstrations in several cities since the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Act are clearly planned and highly coordinated, with agitators connected to groups in different parts of the same city, having transport for rapid movement from one spot to another, given contact numbers to access eminent lawyers, taught to access offline communication...
There I was again, flying on the “Job Creators’ Red Eye” from California to New York – first-class, of course – and I was able to catch up with the papers. One column from December 2nd caught my eye, “Sanctions May Have Fueled Iran Protests, but Have Yet to Further U.S. Goals”, from longtime New York Times White House correspondent David Sanger. The analysis...
A first-ever joint Chinese-Russian-Iranian naval exercise signals that closer Chinese military ties with a host of Middle Eastern nations does not translate into Chinese aspirations for a greater role in regional security any time soon. If anything, the exercise, coupled with notional Chinese support for proposals for a multilateral security approach in the ...
The annual season of joy, compassion, and frenzied shopping with money we mostly don’t have to buy gifts people mostly don’t need, has competition in the market this year. The impeachment fiasco has only appealed to a minority of shoppers among the multitudes, but they number many and are mostly good folks honestly reacting to the program being forcefully fe...
Raja Farooq Haider Khan, the puppet prime minister of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) recently said that he “may be the last prime minister of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK).” AJK is the fallacious name that has been given to such territories of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir that have remained under illegal occupation of Pakistan since...
In a rather gate-crashing mode, the US is positioning itself in Libya in a way that will become yet another Syria as far as the end-game of this war-torn, NATO-destroyed and ‘humanitarianly-intervened’ country is concerned. For some time now, the Russians have been increasing their presence in Libya, supporting Libyan National Army led by Khalifa Haftar. Whi...
On November 15, a wave of protests engulfed over 100 Iranian cities as the government resorted to an extremely unpopular measure: a fuel tax hike of as much as 300%, without a semblance of a PR campaign to explain the reasons. Iranians, after all, have reflexively condemned subsidy removals for years now – especially related to cheap gasoline. If you are une...
At first glance the human rights and environmental issues surrounding a proposed dam seem like serious objections to their construction. In some cases they may be. In other cases – these concerns are manufactured, promoted, and cynically exploited by foreign special interests who seek to impede dam construction and likewise impede the march forward of the de...
In early 2014 Washington staged a blatant coup d’état in Ukraine breaking the historic relationship with Russia and setting the stage for the subsequent NATO demonization of Russia. The one in charge for the Obama Administration of the Ukraine coup was then-Vice President Joe Biden. Today a bizarre Democrat impeachment attempt aimed at President Donald Trump...
After the passing of the amendments in the Citizenship Act, 1955 popularly known as the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) in Parliament, the opposition parties and a section of the media are playing a dangerous game of confusing people by deliberately mixing CAB with the National Register of Citizens (NRC). This cheap ploy for vote bank politics is not only c...
The two-day [Dec. 3-4 – Ed.] London NATO conference just ended – and calling it a NATO “crisis” is not exaggerated. The crisis is such that President Trump canceled the Press Conference at the end of the summit, officially saying that there was enough press briefing during the conference, but rather more honestly hinting at the all-pervading conflict-loaded ...
The foreign policies of France, once guided by the strategic vision of Charles de Gaulle, progressively gave way to the hunt by certain people for some easy money. After having first resisted US imperialism, Jacques Chirac later withdrew from the combat and mixed the affairs of state with his own personal interests. Nicolas Sarkozy served the interests of th...
For the past few days the media has been full of reports about a young woman in Hyderabad, who was gang raped and then murdered by pouring petrol over her and setting her on fire. A phone call and the purchase of petrol led to the arrest of four young men. They were taken to the scene of crime for investigation and shot dead when they allegedly grabbed the w...
Natural gas could well emerge as the litmus test of how relations among the Gulf’s energy-rich monarchies evolve if and when a Saudi-United Arab Emirates-led alliance and Qatar bury their hatchet. It could also position Gulf states as key players in shaping the future of the energy architecture of Eurasia. This week’s (December 10-Ed.) summit in Riyadh of ...
If there were any doubt about the urgency for India’s new citizenship act, Rachel Avraham, who exposed Rohingya Muslim atrocities against Hindus in Myanmar in 2017, provides it in an explicit account of the continuing rapes of Hindu women and girls in Bangladesh. (World ignores mass rape of Hindu women and girls in Bangladesh, Foreign Policy Blogs, Nov. 8,...
The Iranian port city of Bandar-e-Mahshahr has emerged as the scene of some of the worst violence in Iran’s brutal crackdown on recent anti-government protests. Located in Iran’s oil-rich Khuzestan province, home to the country’s restive ethnic Arab minority, the protests in Bandar-e-Mahshahr strengthened Iran in its belief that the anti-government outburst ...
The United States of America (US) released its annual “Country Reports on Terrorism” for the year 2018 on 22 November 2019. The report assesses all major nations of the world in terms of the fight against terrorism with special emphasis on compliance with international norms for countering terrorism. For each country there is an overview followed by listing ...
A Czech mayor’s refusal to endorse Beijing’s One China policy potentially sets a high bar as Western powers grapple with how to respond to allegations of excessive use of violence by police against Hong Kong protesters and the implications of leaked documents detailing a brutal crackdown in China’s north-western province of Xinjiang. Prague mayor Zdenek Hrib...
As Ekal Vidyalaya, the informal rural and tribal school system that strives to take education to the last child in the remotest village and hamlet, opens its 100,000th One Teacher School in Sonegarh, Surat district, Gujarat, today (December 6), the dreams of a whole generation of rural children have already taken wing. An independent venture of volunteers ...
Governments across the globe have been as ineffective in meeting the needs of their citizens as Italy was in preventing Venice, its crown jewel, from flooding. In 2003, as water levels began to rise across the globe, the Italian city’s government initiated an ambitious engineering project to protect its hundred plus islands from flooding. Sixteen years later...
While the EU and United States have all but abandoned nuclear energy as a future power source, with almost no new reactors being built and existing ones being decommissioned, Russia has quietly emerged as the world’s leading builder of peaceful civilian nuclear power plants. Now the Russian state nuclear company, Rosatom, has completed the first commercial f...
The perfidious power play in Pakistan has attained a notorious, dishonourable status. Gen. Qamar Bajwa continues as chief while the Imran Khan government is left to grapple with the directions given by the Supreme Court of the country. This web of deceit smelled rotten right from the word go and has, not surprisingly, left the main protagonists (Khan and Baj...
The defining feature of today’s geopolitical reality is the reorganization of global order with new alignments, new divisions and new forces replacing former norms. At the turn of the century, the situation on the international stage became shaky and unstable, with massive shifts occurring in the structure of interstate relations. As China began gaining more...
The formation of Shiv Sena-Nationalist Congress Party-Congress government in Maharashtra is a fraud on the people of the state and a travesty of their verdict. Never was the politics of power, the hankering after pelf, patronage and office, more visible to the common man in all its stark nakedness. The Bharatiya Janata Party had a chance of shining in solita...