Column Archive

In a surprising move with huge implications for one of the world’s gravest humanitarian crises, last week the Somali Islamic group Al-Shabab told the U.N. World Food Program to stop sending foreign food aid to southern Somalia. According to a report from Voice of America, a U.S. government-funded TV news network, Al-Shabab claimed that the “massive importing of food is ruining Somalia’s agriculture sector.” The Islamists reportedly ordered the U.N. to begin buying food directly from local producers, for onward distribution to the country’s needy. The announcement is surprising and potentially worrisome, for several reasons. The move clearly reflects the […]

During his sojourn in Paris last Friday and Saturday, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his entourage of Russian economics ministers and business executives signed a number of important commercial agreements with their French counterparts. These two-dozen deals will result in increased French involvement in various Russian energy and automobile enterprises, in return for sizable injections of French financing and technology into these sectors. “We are on the way to achieving this goal to transform our good, high-level political relations in the sphere of the real economy,” Putin joyfully told journalists. “I think it is a real breakthrough in the […]