Dive into the archives.
- The classic Game of Global Domination
Being a milcol guy in a pacifist country like Japan can get you into some interesting conversations. the other week one of my new coworkers asked me what I thought of Japan’s North Korea policy, and why the US wasn’t doing more about Pyongyang. In the end he was looking for an explanation why the [...]
- Failed States, Part 2: How Instability Spreads
In a follow-up to yesterday’s post, here’s a solid explainer from Foreign Policy on how instability, whether it be violence, drugs, or refugees, can spread from one country to another spreading the chaos. Abridged from the article linked above:
SUDAN
The violence in Darfur has created a ripple effect that is bleeding into Chad and the [...]
- IEDs Make Their Way to Turkey
While Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are nothing new, they are increasingly finding their way to other conflicts across the globe. Once unheard of in Afghanistan, they are now used with increasing frequency. But Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t the only ones. In the recent Jamestown Foundation newsletter (Terrorism Focus – Volume IV, Issue 20), recent events [...]
- Are the Insurgents Bored?
While Al-Jazeera seems to be overlooking the car bombs found in London, this interesting piece was prominently displayed on their website:
Vigilantes target Iraq porn surfersIbraheem Abdel-Qahar was tortured and made to drink his own urine and chicken blood for looking at pornography. The Iraqi Aid Association (IAA), a Baghdad-based non-governmental organisation working with displacement, [...]
- The Serbian Lone Ranger
1389 still casts a long shadow over the Balkans from Belgrade to Prishtina. Today, The Battle of Kosovo is commemorated in Serbia and to give away the ending, the Serbs lose. Yet, what is the importance of a major loss in a seemingly obscure place and time? After all, Americans celebrate July 4th and not [...]
- Failed States, Part 1: Best and Worst
Via the Strategist’s recent guest post comes the Failed State index. What I found to be the most interesting was not the index itself, which contains the nations typically associated with the label, but the states that had most improved or worsened.
Good news:
Liberia wins the honor of the year’s most improved, where the November [...]
- A Giant Passes
Kiichi Miyazawa, Japanese Prime Minister from 1991-1993 and minister of finance in 1987 and from 1999 to 2002, has died at age 89. Fluent in English, Miyazawa is probably best known in Japan for overseeing perhaps the worst period of modern Japan-US relations. In the US, he is probably best known for getting [...]
- Do not adjust your television sets
I can’t help but chuckle at this news story: Iran bans negative petrol stories. In reaction to rationing of gasoline and outrage by the public that resulted in several gas stations being torched, the top Iranian security body ordered local journalists not to report on the gasoline problems.
Of course, television stations initially didn’t even [...]
- Mapping piracy
The International Maritime Bureau has a live piracy map (based on the Google Maps API) which plots attacks and attempted attacks reported to the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre. Each marker details type of attack, date and vessel type. The archives go back to 2005. The maps give you a good sense of the problem areas, [...]
