American legal influence is waning as foreign courts pay less attention to US court decisions, suggests Adam Liptak in an article for the New York Times. One reason is that Supreme Court justices are wary about citing decisions from foreign courts. As a result, the US loses one of its great bully...
Click here to read the article in The New York Times.
When the Presidents of both America and China visited individual countries in the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) recently, they seemed to have brought with them two different sets of agendas. According to this article in Singapore's Straits Times, while Hu Jintao, the Chinese...
THE spate of summits in South-east Asia this month - the annual meeting in Bali of Asean leaders and their regional dialogue partners, the Apec heads of state convention in Bangkok, accompanied by United States...
Since China's accession into the World Trade Organization, it has indicated that it will not have economic interactions with Taiwan until the 'One China' problem is settled. However, recent statements by a Chinese official seem to suggest Beijing's willingness to engage Taiwan...
If China's promise to Hong Kong -- that the latter's systems would remain unchanged for 50 years after the handover to Chinese rule in 1997 -- amounts to "divide and rule," then the strategy applied to Taiwan should be...
Russia, in developing precision-strike capabilities, replaces old missile systems with road-mobile Iskander-M missile systems. These have a range up to 500 kilometers and can be armed with nuclear warheads. Writing for the Diplomat, Guy Plopsky details the locations: The purpose of systems in...
China listed electric vehicles as one of seven strategic priorities in 2011 and now dominates the markets for batteries from mining cobalt in Africa to production. More than half of the world’s cobalt is in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and a Wall Street Journal articles describes small-...
One of Hinduism's most revered traditions is a trip to the Ganges River. But the sacred river may vanish as the Himalayan source, the Gangotri glaciers, melt with rising temperatures. With the current rates of melting, the glaciers could vanish by 2030 – and scientists predict that, in the...
Click here for the original article on The Washington Post's website.
Countries worldwide are investing more and more in research and development on diseases and drugs to fight them. But few of these projects are aimed at illnesses afflicting the world's poorest regions – illnesses which account for widespread death and devastation. A major reason for this...
For every headline-hitting disease such as SARS and bird flu, there are dozens that rarely make the news but which threaten the populations of developing countries daily, infecting and killing millions because little...
In a time of tremendous scrutiny upon the Arab world, many interpreted the March collapse of the Arab League summit in Tunisia as a sign of Arab impotence. Nader Fergany, the director of Almishkat Centre for Research, and the lead author of the Arab Human Development Report, argues that rather than...
Many would agree that the postponement of the Arab summit in Tunisia was yet another Arab setback. Think again. Had the summit been held under the present conditions it could have made things worse. The Sharm El- Sheikh...