Young internet users can be impressively resourceful. China’s formidable web censors are finding it difficult to control online discussions about Bo Xilai, his wife, Neil Heywood, and other aspects of the most exciting political intrigue to hit China in years.As the FT reports, [T]he country’s 500m-odd web users debated the political drama anyway using pictures, code-words and […]

Despite warnings from the United States, the UN, and virtually every major power in Asia, North Korea yesterday went ahead with its planned long-range missile launch. The missile, which supposedly had the capability to reach as far as Australia, fell apart less than two minutes after take-off. It was a serious embarrassment for Pyongyang, which […]

The Bo Xilai scandal that has exposed deep rifts at the heart of the Chinese political system and grown into an international saga of spy-thriller dimensions led this week to the arrest of Bo’s wife under suspicion of murder. Now it is evolving into a larger indictment of corruption in China.The NYT reports that Chinese […]

The story of Gujurat’s 2002 riots is well-known to most Indians: After a train fire that killed sixty Hindus was blamed on Muslims, Hindu mobs rampaged through towns and cities, killing Muslims and burning buildings. In the end, more than 1,000 were killed.Today, the prosecution of 18 accused Hindu rioters ended with life sentences for […]

The image is quite romantic at first glance: Six Buddhist monks have set sail from Vietnam, destined for the chain of rocky atolls and reefs that make up the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. It’s a desolate archipelago with no indigenous inhabitants that plays host to a few scattered military bases belonging to five of […]

Last month, Via Meadia reported that a top Saudi cleric had issued a fatwa calling on Muslims to destroy all churches in the Arabian peninsula. We were happy to note the response of Mehmet Görmez, head of Turkey’s Religious Affairs Directorate, who eviscerated the Saudi cleric on political, moral, and Islamic grounds. We similarly welcome the recent […]

Some relief for motorists could be on the way, at least according to the latest report from the International Energy Agency (IEA). Despite fears that sanctions against Iran would suffocate global oil production, the IEA said global oil inventories increased by up to 1.2 million barrels a day in the first quarter of 2012. Most […]

The holiest place in Islam is undergoing an enormous facelift. Not very many Westerners seem to realize, or care.Basharat Peer writes about the hajj in this week’s New Yorker. What he found in Mecca is at once tragic and awesome. The Saudis, it seems, are eager “to erase all vestiges of the past.” The Saudis […]

For all his pretensions of being a “transformative” president, Barack Obama’s foreign policy prescriptions are rooted in a deeply conservative and nostalgic tradition. When it comes to Russia, the tradition this White House channels most is that of Richard Nixon. This seemingly incongruous resemblance was well illustrated in a recent controversy over the nullification of […]

The blue social model was based on the political economy of the industrial age: an age of mass manufacturing employment in the US and other advanced countries. The shift from blue to post-blue, from industrial age to post-industrial age society, raises many questions that are at the core of our political debates even if they […]