By Kwasi Kpodo | ACCRA ACCRA West African leaders are still pursuing mediation to ensure a peaceful transfer of power in Gambia where President Yahya Jammeh refused to accept defeat in an election last month, Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said on Saturday. Sirleaf told reporters after a meeting among regional leaders in Ghana’s capital Accra that regional bloc ECOWAS did not yet intend to deploy its […]
A round-up of major happenings in Pakistan in the last week. Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Credit: PTI Panama Papers investigation After weeks of acrimony, the first day in office for new Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar was an unusually harmonious one, with all parties hailing the constitution of a new bench for the Panama Papers hearings that will resume on January 4. Nisar excluded himself from […]
Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone maker, said that its revenues in India had exceeded $1bn last year as it looks abroad for growth amid continuing competitive pressures at home. Chinese-owned technology companies have so far led the smartphone market in India. The subcontinent is seen as the next big untapped market for mobile makers at a time when growth has begun to flag elsewhere. Sales of Xiaomi’s smartphones […]
Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai has some straightforward life advice for students at his alma mater: loosen up and have some fun. The India-born Mr. Pichai, speaking Thursday at the elite Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur outside Kolkata, told university students who asked how they could emulate his success to pursue their passions, take risks, and be creative. That is unconventional advice in a country where parents […]
By Stephen Kalin and Isabel Coles | ERBIL, Iraq ERBIL, Iraq Iraqi forces have retaken around 70 percent of eastern Mosul from Islamic State militants and expect to reach the river bisecting the city in the coming days, Iraq’s joint operations commander told Reuters. Lieutenant General Talib Shaghati, who is also head of the elite counter-terrorism service (CTS) spearheading the campaign to retake the northern city, said […]
By David Brunnstrom and Arshad Mohammed | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON In three words of a tweet this week, U.S. President-elect Donald Trump vowed North Korea would never test an intercontinental ballistic missile. “It won’t happen!” Trump wrote after North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said on Sunday his nuclear-capable country was close to testing an ICBM of a kind that could someday hit the United States. Preventing such […]
Submitted by Federico Pieraccini via Strategic-Culture.org, The two previous articles have focused on the various geopolitical theories, their translations into modern concepts, and practical actions that the United States has taken in recent decades to aspire to global dominance. This segment will describe how Iran, China and Russia have over the years adopted a variety of economic and military actions to repel the continual assault on their sovereignty by the […]
By Isabel Coles and Ali al-Rubaie | MOSUL/HILLA, Iraq MOSUL/HILLA, Iraq Islamic State attacked an Iraqi police checkpoint near the southern city of Najaf on Sunday, killing seven policemen as government forces in the north made more gains against the militants in Mosul, their last major stronghold in the country. The Najaf attack, which involved gunmen and a suicide car bomb, followed blasts a day earlier in […]
ABU DHABI // Dealing with Iran, the conflict in Yemen and finding a viable outcome to the Syrian crisis are the main challenges the United States will face in the Middle East this year, according to a report by an American think-tank. The 2017 Global Forecast by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies found that the US will also have to work on rebuilding its partnerships […]
Tucked away in an inconspicuous building in Al Mamzar, some of the UAE’s most acclaimed thespians sit, drinking tea, writing and talking. The building is split in two – one half, the Dubai Folklore Society, composed of traditional dance troupes, and the other, the Dubai Folklore Society Theatre, devoted to Emirati drama. In a large, quiet room adorned with framed photographs and awards, Abdullah Saleh sits on […]
Tucked away in an inconspicuous building in Al Mamzar, some of the UAE’s most acclaimed thespians sit, drinking tea, writing and talking. The building is split in two – one half, the Dubai Folklore Society, composed of traditional dance troupes, and the other, the Dubai Folklore Society Theatre, devoted to Emirati drama. In a large, quiet room adorned with framed photographs and awards, Abdullah Saleh sits on […]
New penalties for professional advisers who help their clients to evade tax come into force today, as part of a bid by the government to tackle abuses of the excise system. Accountants, bankers, lawyers and other advisers can be fined by up to the value of the tax they helped their client evade, up to a maximum of £3,000. HMRC will also name and shame company involved. […]
ABUJA Nigeria’s government will seek a lasting peace settlement with militants in the oil-producing southern Niger Delta region in 2017, President Muhammadu Buhari said in a New Year’s message on Saturday. Attacks on oil facilities in Nigeria’s energy hub, coupled with low oil prices, helped push Africa’s biggest economy into recession – the first in 25 years – in the second quarter. Crude oil sales account for […]
And there is a red, or more conservative, Israel that thought the secretary of state was delusional and insulting, divorced from the harsh reality of the only real democracy in the Middle East struggling to preserve itself in a hostile neighborhood. Continue reading the main story Just as in the United States, many Israelis cling to their own facts, retreat to their own media outlets, advance their […]
SHANGHAI China has recovered 2.3 billion yuan ($331.27 million) in losses from graft in the first 11 months of this year from across more than 70 different regions and countries, the country’s corruption watchdog said on its official website on Saturday. The news comes after Beijing shifted the focus of its corruption campaign to recover illicit funds taken overseas as part of the country’s multi-agency “Sky Net” […]
There are two stories we can tell about US higher education. In the first, public two- and four-year colleges face increasing student service costs, 20 percent less state support than they received before the recession, and a shortfall they pass onto students, who now graduate with an average of $30,000 of debt. In the second story, those institutions have contained costs, keeping tuition increases at inflationary levels, […]
On October 17, every employee at Dentsu — Japan’s biggest advertising agency and arguably the country’s most influential company — received the same, catastrophic-sounding message from the company’s president, Tadashi Ishii. “The approved way of working at our company cannot be accepted by stakeholders, including the authorities,” said the memo, according to media reports. Coming a month after Dentsu was caught overbilling hundreds of clients, and just […]
By Lesley Wroughton and Yeganeh Torbati | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry warned on Wednesday that Israel’s building of settlements in occupied territory was endangering Middle East peace, expressing unusually frank frustration with the longtime American ally. In a swiftly issued statement, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused Kerry of showing bias. He said Israel did not need to be lectured to by foreign […]
By Jeffrey Heller | JERUSALEM JERUSALEM Jerusalem’s city hall cancelled a vote on Wednesday on applications to build nearly 500 new homes for Israelis in East Jerusalem, a municipal official said, plans that had drawn U.S. criticism in a raging dispute over settlements. The proposed settlement is part of building activity that the U.N. Security Council demanded an end to on Friday, a resolution that a U.S. […]
By Lesley Wroughton and Matt Spetalnick | WASHINGTON WASHINGTON U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry will lay out his vision for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in a speech on Wednesday, days after the United States cleared the way for a U.N. resolution demanding an end to Israeli settlements. The speech, less than a month before President Barack Obama leaves office, is expected to be the administration’s last […]
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Argentina’s former president, has been charged over corruption accusations in public works projects, marking the most significant legal setback for the embattled populist leader. Judge Julián Ercolini cleared the way on Tuesday for legal proceedings against Ms Fernández in what is the second of several cases being investigated to go to trial. She was indicted in May over allegations of manipulating the central […]
Recently, there has been an increase in anti-Semitic statements at the United Nations. Ambassadors have used its forums to accuse Israel of everything from harvesting the organs of slain terrorists to committing a “final solution” against the Palestinian people. In one case, a United Nations under secretary general has made coded comparisons of Israel’s actions to those of the Nazis during the Holocaust (a common anti-Semitic trope). […]
Submitted by Michael Jabara Carley via Strategic-Culture.org, Relations between Russian president Vladimir Putin and US president Barack Obama are poisoned and irretrievably damaged. It’s therefore a good thing that Obama is leaving office on 20 January. Bad US-Russian relations are of course nothing new. Since the Anglo-American war against Iraq in 2003, the US-Russian relationship has been headed downhill. For Obama, it appears that everything has gotten […]
When US authorities started pursuing banks for their role in slicing, dicing and packaging the arcane products that sparked the financial crisis, they initially focused on domestic lenders. Now it is Europe’s banks that are in the crosshairs. Two days before Christmas, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse have agreed to settle with the US Department of Justice over the alleged mis-selling of mortgage-backed securities in the run-up […]
