AidSpeak: A Twitter Dictionary
This past weekend, Bill Easterly, author and former World Bank Economist, put out a challenge over his Twitter to create "witty decoding for development buzzwords" based on the 40 Publishing...
View ArticleA setback for China in Africa
Chinese ambitions in Africa have been no secret to Western policymakers. In the past 7 years, Beijing has devoted over $14 billion dollars to Africa, through a mixture of aid for resources packages...
View ArticleReprieve for Saudi woman sentenced to lashing for driving
Saudi King Abdullah has had a busy week. First was his slow-motion legalization of women's suffrage this past Sunday. Today, there's news that the sentence of 10 lashes for a woman convicted of the...
View ArticleAyatollah Khamenei says Occupy Wall Street could mark the fall of the west
More news about Iran comes today with comments made by Ayatollah Khamenei. In a speech broadcast on Iranian state television, he claimed that the Occupy Wall Street movements would be the end of...
View ArticleQaddafi's death predicted by cheesy 80's sitcom
Colonel Qaddafi's death today has brought about waves of relief, and has raised questions about the future of Libya, but his fall may have been seen by an unexpected source a long time ago. The pilot...
View ArticleJapanese military contractor hacked
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, a Japanese military contractor, confirmed today that a hacking incident from this past August released confidential information regarding classified warplanes and nuclear...
View ArticleReport: Qaddafi wrote to Berlusconi near the end
During his last, desperate days, Colonel Qaddafi may have turned to an old friend, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi for help in trying to avert the international action being undertaken by NATO's...
View ArticleAnonymous targets the Zetas
A recently discovered video from online hacker group, Anonymous, has threatened to expose collaborators of the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel in retaliation for the kidnapping one of the members of the...
View ArticleAustralia passes landmark carbon legislation. Who's next?
Australia's government this week approved the world's most comprehensive legislation so far regarding global greenhouse gas emissions, including a new tax on carbon emissions. From Reuters: "Today...
View ArticleGreece's other crisis: An HIV outbreak
As Europe continues to be roiled by the ongoing effects of the debt crisis, another situation is quietly gripping Greece. Reuters reports that the number of new cases of the virus detected in the...
View ArticleSlumdog real estate moguls
India's rising economic stature has brought millions of its citizens into the ranks of the middle class. It seems another boom is on for some of Mumbai's poorest residents as a result of a large spike...
View ArticleChina's Solyndra?
Money for clean energy is creating political messes all over. Of course, there are the Obama administration's ongoing troubles over loans to now-bankrupt solar manufacturer Solyndra. Now comes a...
View ArticleTop Secret British war plans (from 1943) taken from Tehran embassy
Word came out yesterday that confidential war plans were stolen from the British embassy in Tehran. Fortunately for London, the plans were 70 years old, and were designed to invade Northern France in...
View ArticleThe Coca-Cola kingdom
Coca Cola has recently been criticized by political activists for its ongoing support of Swaziland's King Mswati III. The king has come under international and domestic scrutiny for his lavish...
View ArticleCan Qatar bail out France's banlieues?
While the investors and credit ratings agencies may be mulling over the economic turmoil gripping France, one set of investors is seeing opportunity. In Le Monde, Arthur Frayer profiled the efforts of...
View ArticleFailure to Launch?
When space programs have some sort of setback, it's usually tied to an arithmetic error, or because of the sheer complexity of launching something into outer space. For Russian Federal Space Agency...
View ArticleObama's foreign policy -- in words
What foreign policy-related words are you most likely to hear during tonight's State of the Union address? Since the economy is the dominant issue in the 2012 presidential campaign, you may not be...
View ArticleNorth Korea: Please turn off your cell phone... or else
Put your phones and personal electronics away in North Korea, or risk a messy ending. The Telegraph reported this morning that cell phone users in North Korea will be deemed "war criminals," as part...
View ArticleMerkel to stump for Sarko?
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is facing a tough reelection campaign as he struggles to contain the unraveling economic situation within the E.U. His opponent, Socialist candidate Francois Hollande...
View Article