Archive - Oct 1, 2008 - Article

Effective control

Too often Great Powers assumed that the world was their playground. They drew lines on a geographic map, creating political entities -“facts on the ground”. This meddling in regional politics has come to haunt the world in the form of multiple border disputes. The Powers ignored the fact that no inhabited land is a “clean slate” and an unacceptable line in the sand sows the seeds of future conflicts. Thus border conflicts have become part of the tradition of the postcolonial world. One such dispute is brewing between Iran and the United Arab Emirates in the Persian Gulf over the status of three islands, Abu Musa, the Greater Tunb and the Lesser Tunb >>>

The last straw

One wonders at times what constitutes the wealth of a nation. How can one consider a nation wealthy, or not so? Is gold the yardstick? Precious metals? In truth, the tangible measure of a country’s wealth nowadays is the hard currency reserves of that country, and that information is conveniently published in certain magazines and newspapers, for instance, The Economist. So let’s go over these figures (and mines’ are not the most recent): At the top of the list stands China with more than a trillion dollars worth of hard currencies. Next to china … (yes you guessed correctly) is Japan with more than 800 billion dollars. We see the South East Asian countries dominating the top ten. At about number 11 stands Russia>>>