August 2014

Beirut, Lebanon , Cape Town, South Africa , Chennai, India , Chicago, US, Dublin, Ireland, Istanbul, Turkey, Jakarta, Indonesia, Lagos, Nigeria, Melbourne, Australia, Panama City, Panama 1.    Beirut, Lebanon Despite its turbulent history, Beirut stands out as being an ideal place for adventurous real estate investors. There has been some recent spill-over from the ongoing Syrian conflict. But the Mediterranean …

Target the 90 companies who pollute the most. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released its third of four planned reports. This one is on mitigation, or the ‘human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases.’ There have been many such reports before by the IPCC and others; and many more reports …

Two Distinct but Interlinked Phenomena. Population, poverty and economic development are the three phenomena which are closely inter-linked and highly inter-related. Economics suggests that the rapid population growth brings a steep fall in per capita income which results in a continuously faltering state of human well-being. This, in turn, leads to increased level of poverty. Thus, this vicious circle keeps …

Pakistan and the Regime Change in Neighbouring Countries. After almost a decade, new leaders in the countries on eastern and western borders of Pakistan emerged. In India, after 10-year-long rule of the Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has come at the helm with Narendra Modi becoming country’s fifteenth Prime Minister. Similarly, in Afghanistan, end to a decade-long rule of …

The 1000 Electricity Transmission and Trade Project for Central Asia and South Asia (CASA), or CASA-1000, project is a groundbreaking initiative in terms of cooperation in the fields of energy. It is believed that the project will set new levels of economic and regional cooperation in this region that is abundant in natural resources to produce huge amounts of electricity. …

‘Even though human life may be the most precious thing on earth, we always behave as if there were something of higher value than human life.’ These words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery, a renowned French aristocrat, struck my mind when I saw the heart-wrenching images of brutally-murdered Gaza children. In today’s world, where abuse or misuse of an animal may …

HISTORICAL OPPORTUNITY OR CONTEMPORARY OPPORTUNISM? The recent crisis that is threatening Iraq in the form of ISIS has brought to the fore the issue of the probable independence of Kurdistan as the newest state in the world. While the Kurds see the present crisis as a historical opportunity to consolidate their much-desired sovereign state on the plea that Iraq as …

Discussion about water in South Asia, in particular the shared rivers of the region, is vociferous, antagonistic and increasingly associated with national security. Renewable water resources in the region have fallen dramatically on a per capita basis since the 1960s. India hit the ‘water stress’ mark around a decade ago, Pakistan slightly earlier. Groundwater is fast depleting in India, Pakistan …

The pace and rapidity with which the fragile state-building process in Iraq has imploded is almost unbelievable. Observers around the world are stunned by the speed and scope of the assaults on every major city in the upper Tigris River Valley ‘ including Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city ‘ by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The group has been marching …

The EU citizens, in recent elections to the European Parliament (EP), sent a strong and clear message to the European leaders to take a lesson from their low turnout and their choices to move to the extreme sides of the political spectrum. The EP election results reflected political and social trends of recent years in the EU. Although the general …