All over the Muslim world, and in the Arab countries in particular, there now lives a class of Western expatriates, usually American, who live like an imperial elite and whose true role is often unclear.
For some Americans, the ‘information revolution’ has transformed life radically. Yet for others the new technology and the ‘new economy’ it has helped to set in motion have only created a new dividing line between the information “haves” and “have-nots.”
There appears to be no method in George W. Bush’s madness; since becoming president in a dubious presidential election, he has unleashed a flurry of policy statements and directives that have irked friend and foe alike.
With the transnational corporate news media increasingly legitimizing ideas and informing people, it becomes increasingly important to scrutinise what is left out of the stories being told. The global news media uniformly trumpet the virtues of ‘globalization’...
The Bush administration’s close interest in the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia (at a time when it is distancing itself from other regional disputes mediated by the US in the recent past), and its readiness to accept Russia as well as France as co-mediators, has led to speculation that a settlement is a distinct possibility.
The arrest last month in Serbia of Slobodan Milosevic on corruption charges has aroused hopes that he might one day be brought to the Hague to face war crimes charges. He has already been indicted as a war criminal.
Aware that its finances are in shambles and need a large handout just to survive, the government of Pakistan has decided to tap the one resource — overseas Pakistanis — which it feels can be mobilised to see it through the present crisis. While the assumption is correct, the plan may not work as planned.
That oppressors everywhere try to maintain the status quo by trying to delegitimize the struggle of those whom they are oppressing is understandable.
The latest diplomatic row between the US and China is simply another episode in America’s ongoing struggle with its own belligerence on a global scale. While the corporate news media dutifully reported to satellite-viewers the tit-for-tat diplomacy...
Two recent low-key reports, which appear to have been largely ignored by the international media, despite their importance, indicate that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Voice of America (VOA) are to be reorganised.
US secretary of state general Colin Powell’s tour of the Middle East in February has heralded a change in America’s policy on Iraq. In addition to “re-energizing” the sanctions regime, Washington will actively seek to overthrow Iraqi president Saddam Hussein.
Western pharmaceutical companies, which monopolise the right to fix the price of life-saving drugs throughout the world by patents protected by the World Trade Organization and governments, are facing new challenges that demand unprecedented concessions.
The west’s handling of the recent outburst of violence in south-eastern Serbia and north-western Macedonia has exposed what it stood for all along: to quash the aspirations of ethnic Albanians in the former Yugoslavia for independence and freedom...
Since he became president last July, Bashar al-Asad of Syria has initiated a process of political and economic reform. Asad has issued a series of decrees and submitted several draft laws to the country’s People’s Assembly (parliament) dealing with various aspects of Syrian political and socio-economic life.
After nearly a decade of silence, former Algerian president Chadli Benjedid has spoken. In statements to Algerian journalists last month, Benjedid responded to criticism describing his 10-year presidency as the “black decade” and accusing him of making a deal with the Islamic Salvation Front (Front Islamique de Salut or FIS).
With the opening of the 2001 World Economic Forum (WEF) meetings in Davos, satellite-TV viewers worldwide have once again seen drastic security measures against the threat of protests. From Seattle to Switzerland, in recent years global economic policy meetings have come under fire from a broad coalition of what the media call ‘anti-globalization’ or ‘anti-capitalist’ forces.
Despite widespread concern about the impact of depleted-uranium weapons used by the West in Iraq and elsewhere, western governments refused to address the issues until their own troops started developing cancer.
In an attempt to put a happier face on globalization, G8 (Group of Eight, also known as ‘Greedy Eight’) leaders tried to placate the world’s less fortunate at their summit in Japan last July by promising to set up a Digital Opportunities Task Force (DOT) to identify ways to encourage the spread of technology to the farthest reaches of the “developing world”.
The long-awaited Hamoodur Rahman Commission Report into the East Pakistan debacle of 1971 was finally released on December 30, 2000, although “sensitive” segments still remain out of the public eye. Even the 700 pages that have been released...
As the al-Aqsa intifada continues in Palestine, Muslims all over the world are taking to the streets to express their support.
