This is a guest post by Parag Khanna, A Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order. Khanna is pictured above with his team mates who drove this ambulance in an 8000 mile Mongolia charity rally.
The news Saturday that after years of failed negotiations the United Arab Emirates will ban the data and email service on Blackberry phones after October 11 without an agreement allowing the Emirates to monitor the currently encrypted data raises fascinating questions about how authoritarian governments cope with emerging technologies.
(Moments before the destruction of the Bedouin village of al-Arakib, Israeli high school age police volunteers lounge on furniture taken from a family’s home; photo credit: Ata Abu Madyam, Arab Negev News; click image to make larger) I support Israel’s legitimate interests and rights in what is a very tough neighborhood, but this behavior —…
(A digital rendering of the U.S. Capitol as it would have looked in 1814; credit: Scott Berg) Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s genius in planning Washington, DC becomes even more dramatic when reading and looking through this material presented in an interactive presentation in the Washington Post Magazine by George Mason University’s Scott Berg.
China’s Vice President Xi Jinping is widely seen in Beijing power circles as Hu Jintao’s likely successor as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China and President of the People’s Republic of China.
Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Brian Katulis has given Politico an essay on the foreign policy divide in the GOP that I would have loved to run here at The Washington Note.
As it becomes increasingly clear that Pakistan will likely play an important role in any negotiated settlement in Afghanistan, it is important to understand Pakistan’s motivations and strategy in South Asia. But in order to understand Pakistan’s government, we must also understand how average Pakistani’s view their country, it’s policies, its neighbors, and more.
(photo of Jackson Ikenberry next to Hachiko at Shibuya Station, Japan; photo credit: G. John Ikenberry) Sorry folks. This may be a bit inside for some of you — but I have this sort of weird, psycho connection with G. John Ikenberry, a professor of international relations at Princeton University.
I was pleased with how this discussion came out on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show in which we discussed the secret military field reports recently made public by Wikileaks. Also on the program was New York Times chief Pakistan correspondent, Jane Perlez. A side note about the line I used.
(Two boys and a pup in a tub being pulled to safey in Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province, China; photo credit: Li Jinxiong, China Daily) The real story behind the picture above is that there have been devastating floods in several of China’s provinces — including Zhejiang Province and Henan Province.
