Lifting restrictions on travel visas is supposed to spur tourism. Yet a few citizens do quick cost-benefit checks of other nations’ laws, then hop on planes, relocating for benefits: With the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution providing citizenship to those born in the United States, thousands...
Born in the USA: Social-economic advantages of American citizenship draw Taiwanese women to give birth on US soil (top); some US citizens are not happy
TAIPEI: “America is the greatest country in the world with one of the worst health insurance...
While many are aware of the "triangular" slave trade among Europe, Africa and the Americas in the 18th century, few people realize that Asian-European trade was also instrumental in sustaining the exchange of human slaves. For example, French ships carrying European goods to Asia returned...
19th-century lithograph of a French ship transporting slaves to the colonies in the Caribbean (Source: Digital Media Lab, University of Virginia Library)
NEW HAVEN: The role that international trade has played in developing a globally integrated...
Iran stands increasingly big potential new target for America's fight against terrorism. As the US's new foreign policy—outlined after September 11th by the Bush administration—continues to take shape, Iran finds itself under (verbal) attack from the US and UK as a nation with a radical...
To the countries of the former Eastern Bloc and parts of the so-called "rogue states" of the Middle East, a short rain of intervention came gently just after the Cold War. The principle of intervention based on...
The US and China are parties to the world’s most important bilateral relationship, and this two-part series analyzes the challenges and opportunities confronting two world powers. In the first article, China scholar David Shambaugh presents a litany of issues that bedevil their relations. From...
Hands on: Presidents Bush and Hu Jintao meet to discuss real issues, in 2005. (Photo: White House)
WASHINGTON: Chinese President Hu Jintao’s meeting with President George W. Bush at the White House on April 20...
For skilled hackers, computers of top corporations and governments are as easy to break into as a locked car. For at least five years, hackers had secret access to computer systems of the United Nations, ASEAN, national governments, multinational corporations, defense contractors, media, Olympic...
Click here for the article in Vanity Fair.
Rivers contribute to transport, tourism, hydropower and resources including fish and freshwater. Yet excessive drought, dam-building and other development can ruin rivers. That is happening to the Mekong River, which flows from Tibet to the South China Sea. The Lower Mekong winds through Cambodia,...
Damned by humans: Laos population in Attopeu suffered from a collapsed dam in 2018, and elsewhere sandbanks fill the Mekong River
CAN THO CITY, MEKONG DELTA: The swirling currents of the once mighty Mekong, shrunk by drought and increasingly...
In the lead up to the invasion of Iraq – and especially with the difficulties the US has encountered since – there is a renewed interest in the historical experience of past imperial efforts. Not surprisingly, the publication of British historian Niall Ferguson's provocative history of the...
Do-gooders: British colonials in Africa.
NEW HAVEN: After the cataclysm of Sept. 11, 2001, it suddenly became fashionable to talk about "empire" as a description of the US role in the world-system. For the fifty years preceding that, only...