Yiyi Lu: China is now paying a heavy environmental price for its economic growth
Last September, the deputy director of a local Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in central China led a team to investigate the illegal discharge of waste water by a pharmaceutical factory. While the director was taking a sample of the waste water, he [...]

read more....

Israel managed to bring two of its soldiers home on Wednesday. But even still, praise for the prisoner exchange with Hezbollah has been scant. Israel, say German commentators, has allowed itself to be blackmailed. more…

Two Coffins for a Murderer: Israel’s Delicate Prisoner Swap with Hezbollah
Photo Gallery: The Prisoner Swap between Hezbollah and Israel

read more....

Like Camus’ Oranians, who refused to believe in the plague, we are in grave danger of underestimating Iran
Have some commentators responded to the Iranian regime’s threat to the state of Israel in the same way as Oranians? The question is raised in a new study (PDF) by Joshua Teitelbaum, an academic who lays out exactly [...]

read more....

Analysts see a host of reasons to keep away from full-scale violence. Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Israeli foreign minister, and Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council, write in the Christian Science Monitor that bombing runs alone won’t destroy “any potential clandestine facilities in Iran nor Iran’s knowledge of the enrichment process.” Mohamad ElBaradei, [...]

read more....

As always – but especially now with globalization intensifying the effect — a few continuing events dominate the worldwide media. From the drama of the natural catastrophe that has befallen the Chinese and the Burmese to the falderal surrounding the American presidential campaign, the headlines and the commentators leave little room for these “minor” topics.
Events [...]

read more....

The world is in a state of flux. China is growing rapidly, but is very unstable. Russia has been doing much better economically in the last few years, but there are storm clouds on the horizon. Russia oil output looks like it may start to decline shortly. The Russian military machine is decaying faster than [...]

read more....