Robert Reich on the world’s rich are splitting into two seperate elites: one national and one global. [ADDED 8.1.2006] Comments Dec 4, '05
The scramble for African oil: a Chinese view. [ADDED 8.1.2006] Comments Sep 26, '05
Canada flexes Arctic muscles
Monday, 29 August 2005, 14:48
For those who have missed it, the NATO allies Canada and Denmark are in a border spat over a tiny, remote island off Greenland north of the Arctic Circle.
The RCN has been conducting “Arctic sovereignty patrols” in the nippy region. In July, the RCN planted a flag on Hans Island, and the Canadian defense minister Bill Graham later made an unannounced visit, prompting protests from Copenhagen, which dispatched its own naval ships to region. Before things got ugly, the two countries decided to settle the dispute at the United Nations.
Now Canada is set to use a privatly-owned satellite to monitor the Arctic north, according to ministerial briefing notes obtained by the Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act, Candada’s Freedom of Information legislation:
Canada will be spending C$400m on images from the Radarsat 2 satellite, which will be launched next summer:
Passing over the North Pole 14 times daily, recording images of ships, aircraft — even pollution — at a rate of 3,000 square kilometres per second, it will be the linchpin in the Canadian military’s Project Polar Epsilon.
The documents insist that “Polar Epsilon has no connection to the U.S. ballistic missile defence program.”
Update: Here’s a post putting all this into context from the Canadian position.
Underreported stories from Africa
Tuesday, 7 June 2005, 16:27
I’ve only discovered it now, nearly two months after it was published, but every blogger and journalist ought to read Koranteng Ofosu-Amaah’s amazing, rambling post about the underreported stories from Africa.
Subtitled “100 issues that the journalist in me feels the media should investigate”, the post nods at loads of interesting stories the author would like to hear more about.
I wasted some time trying to add some value by distilling it into a shorter, bullet-pointed list for the time-constrained, but it just isn’t possible (or appropriate). Read it all. If you’re short on time, scroll down and start reading at the cross-head “An African’s Perspective” That’s were the rapid-fire list of underreported stories is.
If you want to find the agents of European integration, and they are not all found in Brussels. The Economist, for example, suggests that “Stelios Haji-Ioannou and Michael O’Leary, the two pioneers of Europe’s low-cost airlines, have done more to integrate Europe than any numbers of diplomats and ministers.” [ADDED 14.1.2006] Comments Jan 31, '05
Chinese Chery to export to Europe
Tuesday, 11 January 2005, 14:15
Some more evidence of China beginning to punch in its economic weight-class: the state-owned Chery Automobile company plans to begin exporting to Europe in 2007.
Keeping China in perspective
Sunday, 19 December 2004, 13:06
Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution quotes the following “fact of the day” from the Wall Street Journal:
…at $1.2 trillion, Italian GDP is roughly the size of China’s, and Italy’s total foreign-trade value of $750 billion is only slightly smaller than that of the mainland.
Methological nationalism
Tuesday, 7 December 2004, 14:36
I’ve stumbled across this excellent paper on “methodological nationalism” (PDF by Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, whcih neatly explains the tricky issue of how the social sciences have fallen into the ontological trap of taking the present nation-state system as a given, taking the national as natural. [ADDED 8.1.2006]
EU Observer has a story today about the US government’s lobbying efforts against the EU chemical regulations known as REACH. Comments Nov 23, '04
