Wednesday-Night

NYT Pakistan News
CIA World Factbook - Pakistan
BBC Pakistan country profile
Reuters blog Pakistan: Now or Never?
Pakistan’s Gambit in Afghanistan
There’s a sense that Afghans are losing confidence in the allied operations, and Pakistan is looking to “exploit that advantage,” says CFR South Asia expert Daniel Markey. Pakistan would like an […]

Global voices Iranian elections 2009 ; NYT Topics Iran; The Economist Iran archives & country briefing
(Chatham House) Preliminary Analysis of the Voting Figures in Iran’s 2009 Presidential Election
Tehran’s Take: Understanding Iran’s US Policy (Foreign Affairs July/August 2009)
Iran stands firm over Ashtiani stoning case
Foreign powers should stop interfering in the case of an Iranian woman who […]

Anthony Germain: China in Africa
Investments come without demands for democracy
(CBC) Across Africa, China is pursuing a natural resources bonanza. In Angola it’s oil; in Mozambique, it’s timber and in Zambia, it’s copper. This grand enterprise has earned the world’s greatest emerging economy both friends and critics.
The Chinese in recent years have lent Africans billions of […]

Natural Resources Defense Council: Transition to Green
Gulf of Mexico oil spill
Question of the Day: What do the oil catastrophe and the Wall Street collapse have in common?
In both cases, a powerful, politically protected industry invented something that could not easily be repaired when it broke….
The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES)
John Stewart on the […]

Chalk River reactor to restart in July: AECL
Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. says it estimates that the National Research Universal reactor will resume medical isotope production by the end of July.
The NRU reactor in Chalk River, Ont., has been off-line for more than a year for repair of a radioactive water leak.
Doctors who rely on […]

The mystery continues
Russia jails ‘pirate’ over Arctic Sea ship mystery
(BBC) Andrei Lunev, from the Estonian capital Tallinn, is the first to be sentenced over the incident last July. He was found guilty of piracy.
While the authorities will be pleased to see these men convicted, there are still many unanswered questions about the whole Arctic Sea […]

The evening opened with a brief video of the presentation of the Lieutenant Governor’s Seniors Medal (Médaille pour les aînés) awarded for volunteer service, to our OWN Herb Bercovitz on May 1st. Peter Trent, who had nominated Herb, was on the stage, beaming with pride. The honorees also included a great number of impressive young […]

See also Israel and Afghanistan
Know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more. … We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With […]

Global Energy Hub Journal of Energy Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Global Energy After the Crisis
(Foreign Affairs March/April 2010) Commercially traded energy is what classical economists used to call a “basic good”: directly or indirectly, it enters the production of every other produced commodity or service. Nonrenewable fossil-fuel energy and nuclear energy are […]

Everything is soothed by oil, and this is the reason why divers send out small quantities of it in their mouths, because it smoothes every part of which is rough. - Pliny the elder
Argentina and the Falklands - Oil and troubled waters
There is some concern that irrational greed arising from the discovery of oil under […]