China’s demographic landscape is rapidly changing, and the government has responded by launching ambitious social and health service reforms to meet the changing needs of the country’s 1.3 billion people. This week, officials approved a…
Category: Asia
“Epic in scale, unprecedented in world history.” That is how William K. Black, professor of law and economics and former bank fraud investigator, describes the frauds in which JPMorgan Chase (JPM) has now been implicated….
In the late 1980s, the leaders of the west promised Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev that they would not expand eastward if the Soviet Union pulled out of Eastern Europe and ended the Cold War. That promise was not kept. A triumphal West stuck it to the Soviet Union’s greatly weakened Russian successor, by incorporating the former Warsaw Pact countries into NATO and the EU. But that was not enough to sate the lust of the neo-liberal triumphalists in search of a new imperium. Their next move tried to incorporate the Caucasus country of Georgia — a country more a part of Central Asia than of Europe — into the West’s sphere of influence. That turned out to be a bridge too far; the Russians intervened militarily to put a stop to the lunacy. But events in the Ukraine suggest that stop may have been viewed as a temporary speed bump on the pathway to rolling back Russia’s geography to the years of Ivan the Terrible.
Will the Builders of Unsafe Nuclear Reactors Finally Face Scrutiny? We’ve previously noted that General Electric should be held partially responsible for the Fukushima reactor because General Electric knew that its reactors were unsafe: 5 of…
Opposition illusions not helping Syria talks: Iran Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has warned that negotiating based on the illusions of power by the foreign-backed Syrian opposition does not help achieve a peaceful…
On 24 January, a senior officer in the Israeli military intelligence held a special briefing, at which it was reported that there is «the possibility» of Israel rethinking its strategy in the Syrian conflict. The reason?…
The UN General Assembly has called for a worldwide truce for the duration of the 22nd Winter Olympic Games and the 11th Paralympic Winter Games in Sochi, Russia. The call poses the question why the…
Make no mistake about it, Ukraine’s troubles, engineered from outside of the country by the usual troika of the European Union «securocrats» who are beholden to the interests of the United States and NATO, George…
The violence on the streets of Ukraine is far more than an expression of popular anger against a government. Instead, it is merely the latest example of the rise of the most insidious…
As the media spotlight shines on U.S. negotiators talking with Iranians and Syrians, the Israeli-Palestinian talks have faded into the background. They’re still grinding on, slowly, with several contentious issues unresolved. One of…