Briefing Archive

HONG KONG — Soaring world rice prices are finally showing real signs of abating, easing worst-case fears that inflation-fueled food shortages could lead to widespread starvation and social unrest. A bumper crop in Pakistan, an improved harvest in Thailand and a boost in exports from Japan resulted in a 14 percent drop in the price of rice over the last five trading days, its biggest fall since July 2004. According to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), rice prices skyrocketed by 76 percent between December 2007 and April. However, traders said a decision by Islamabad to export 1 million […]

The latest figures released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute show a precipitous decline in the volume of Russian weapons sales to the Chinese military. Although Beijing remains the single largest recipient of Russian arms, the figures show a 63 percent decrease in the value of major Russian weapons deliveries to China, which is the lowest level in a decade. The decrease contributed to a 29 percent reduction in Russia’s overall export of major conventional weapons systems between 2006 and 2007. In addition, China and Russia have not signed any major new arms contracts in recent years and are […]

WASHINGTON — In April 2003, in Baghdad, Army Specialist Garth Stewart stepped on a land mine. The blast blew off half his left leg. The next thing he knew, he was in a military hospital being prepped for the eventual fitting of a prosthesis. Today, Stewart is a poster boy for the Army’s latest generation of “intelligent” robotic limbs that move and flex like real limbs — and adapt themselves to a wearer’s unique gait. Prostheses have come a long way since the wooden peg leg, but in the future they might not be necessary at all. One military medical […]

KAMPALA, Uganda — Denmark’s Ambassador to Uganda was away when his wife looked out the window and saw a young man fall from the sky and land on her garden. She made a frantic call to her husband, Stig Barlyng, who immediately sped home to his residence in a posh suburb in Kampala. But by the time Barlyng arrived home, the guards from the Chieftaincy of Military Intelligence (CMI) headquarters next door had already overpowered Barlyng’s guard and recaptured their escapee. “I went next door and I started yelling a bit, to put it mildly,” recalls Barlyng, who is months […]

It has become impossible to credibly argue that the Bush Administration’s Middle East policies have advanced the national interests of the United States. After shifting enormous resources toward addressing the problems of the region following the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and after cautioning patience through the “birth pangs of democracy,” the results have become clear. On every issue that the administration has prioritized — promoting Arab-Israeli peace, liberating Lebanon from Syrian and Iranian influence, democratizing Egypt, stabilizing Iraq, and containing Iran — America’s foes have grown stronger and its allies have grown weaker. Even more troublingly, virtually all of […]

NEW YORK — Sri Lanka, celebrating its 60th anniversary of independence from British colonial rule this year, is using a carrot-and-stick strategy in the war that has enveloped the island nation for some 25 years and brought it to the brink of economic disaster. The country’s government has achieved some initial success in containing the home-grown terrorism perpetrated by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), commonly known as the Tamil Tigers, as it tries to wean away the Tamil population from supporting the LTTE’s agenda of carving out an independent state in the northern and eastern parts of the […]

U.S. and South Korean officials are meeting in Washington this week to discuss provision of food aid to North Korea, amid concerns that the impoverished country is en route to severe famine. Seoul is waiting for Pyongyang to officially request its help, while Washington is basing the timing of its 500,000-ton donation on Pyongyang’s progress toward a denuclearization agreement. The talks come just days after Pyongyang released 18,000 pages worth of documents on its weapons-grade plutonium program. But nuclear weapons technology isn’t all that’s being bought and sold on the black market in North Korea. After the famine of the […]

TORREÓN, Mexico — The Mexican political class doesn’t agree on much, but no one denies that the country’s political left today is a hopeless mess. Every day brings a fresh embarrassment, a new descent into the bizarre. The present state of affairs is all the more conspicuous given the heights to which the left rose less than two short years ago. Ironically, the decline can be traced to the very man who almost lifted the left into the presidency. As 2006 dawned, everything was gangbusters for the darling of the Mexican left, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. The ex-mayor of Mexico […]

When it emerged in mid-March that the perpetrator of a deadly suicide attack on American troops in Afghanistan had come from Germany, the American media showed remarkably little interest. On March 3, 28-year-old Cüneyt Ciftci from Ansbach in Bavaria drove a pick-up loaded with several tons of explosives into a guard post in Khost province in southeastern Afghanistan and then detonated his payload while still inside the truck. According to U.S. Army and Afghan sources, two American soldiers and two Afghans were killed in the attack and another seven persons, including four soldiers, were wounded. The Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), […]

On Saturday, Hu Jintao concluded the first state visit by a Chinese president to Japan in almost a decade. President Jiang Zemin traveled to Japan in 1998, but the subsequent deterioration in relations between Beijing and Tokyo severely curtailed high-level meetings. Although Chinese and Japanese officials managed on this occasion to finesse such recently contentious issues as Tibet and food safety, Hu’s May 6-10 sojourn failed to resolve the deeper sources of these earlier bilateral tensions. Before Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s visit to Beijing in October 2006, the Chinese government had frozen high-level summits with Japanese leaders outside the […]

While the world’s diplomatic and media attention focused on the natural disaster in Burma, a major political and strategic move reshaped the Middle East, handing yet another defeat to the West and a crucial victory to Iran: In the blink of an eye, the Islamic Republic of Iran conquered Lebanon. The mop up operations have not ended, but the key outcome is clear: Hezbollah, the militia created by Tehran and loyal to Iran’s leading Ayatollah, has gained control of Lebanon. The crisis had been simmering for months, but the boiling point came on May 7, when Hezbollah militias — heavily […]

CAIRO, Egypt — On Sunday, May 4, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak celebrated his 80th birthday. On the front pages of government-owned newspapers, oversized pictures of the president were displayed with an extensive list of his accomplishments since acquiring power from the late Answar Sadat in 1981. Nevertheless, on that same bright, humid morning, the presence of five olive-green riot patrol vehicles parked just a few feet from one of Cairo’s busiest squares, Talat Al Harb, attested that all is not well in Mubarak’s domain. Inside the police vehicle, officers with black uniforms and matching hats sat yawning and smoking cigarettes […]

In a recent announcement that went virtually unnoticed in the Western media, an official of Saudi Aramco — Saudi Arabia’s national oil company — stated that Saudi Arabia aims to double its oil exports to China from last year’s levels, reaching 1 million barrels per day by 2010. Should this goal be realized, China will soon rival the United States and Japan as one of the top destinations for Saudi petroleum. In addition, the China National Petrochemical Corporation (Sinopec) already has an agreement with Iran to buy 250 million tons of liquid natural gas from the country over 30 years, […]

OLYMPIC PARDONS PROPOSED FOR CHINA DISSIDENTS — U.S.- and Hong Kong-based human rights group Dui Hua May 8 made public a previous appeal to Chinese officials to pardon political prisoners ahead of the Beijing Olympic Games. The appeal, which was delivered to the head of China’s parliament through government channels in April, said such a move would reinforce Olympic ideals and promote peace and humanitarianism. “This is a concrete step that China can take. We’ve hopefully tried to raise it as a suggestion, not a criticism,” Joshua Rosenzweig, head of Dui Hua’s research and programs told the Los Angeles Times. […]

On May 6, during Russian President Vladmir Putin’s last day in office, the American and Russian governments finally signed their long-sought civil nuclear energy agreement. The accord facilitates the transfer of technologies, materials, equipment and other components used to conduct nuclear research and produce nuclear power. Putin and Bush originally announced their intent to negotiate a U.S.-Russia Agreement for Peaceful Nuclear Cooperation (known as a “123 Agreement”) at their joint news conference held on the sidelines of the July 2006 G-8 summit in St. Petersburg. Section 123 of the 1954 Atomic Energy Act requires the United States to negotiate a […]

PARIS — One year to the day after his election as president of France, Nicolas Sarkozy strikes an increasingly lonely figure on the French political scene. Having referred to himself as the “buying power president” to emphasize his goal of increasing disposable income, he has instead become the object of a nationwide case of buyer’s remorse. His popularity has plummeted in opinion polls, and in the absence of any true political opposition (outside of an increasingly hostile press), he faces growing disenchantment within his own UMP majority. In a country where politics is a blood sport, and where the only […]

DENPASAR, Indonesia —When he took office one year ago, Irwandi Yusuf knew his job was going to be tough. And a little more than one year later, over a coffee in his office in Banda Aceh, he acknowledged that it is not getting any easier. “I know the job better now, but my support base is getting more and more disobedient,” he said. Irwandi is the first directly elected governor of Aceh, the once war-torn province of Indonesia and the area worst hit by the December 2004 tsunami. He was elected in December 2006 with almost 40 percent of the […]