In Asian media this week: Canada, India tensions have sorry history. Plus: BRI shows most countries shun ‘decoupling’; Myanmar rebels ‘will never give up’; China to dominate green car market; Putin and Kim lead ‘axis of outcasts’; China decline the fashionable chatter in Washington. By the time of this month’s G20 summit in New Delhi, Continue reading »
Asia
Growing touchiness as scandals mount. Singapore appears to be escalating its campaign to control the political narrative in the face of a growing series of scandals by invoking its “Fake News” law, known by the acronym POFMA, against the East Asia Forum, an Australia-based academic website run by the Australia National University’s Crawford School of Continue reading »
How ironic that mainstream newspapers and conservative commentators should lambast former prime minister Paul Keating for living in the past when he denounced the AUKUS agreement and the Labor government’s fulsome support of it. It was, of course, the AUKUS agreement itself, entered into by Scott Morrison, Boris Johnson and Joe Biden in 2022, that Continue reading »
South Korea is among the nations with the highest coal power generation. South Korean government is moving ahead to launch commercial operation of the Samcheok coal power plant in Gangwon-do province in October defying opposition from civil society groups and the Catholic Church. Since October 2021, Catholic groups have been staging protests every month at Continue reading »
In Asian media this week: Hanoi, but not Jakarta, a deliberate choice. Plus: ASEAN must ease great power tensions; G20 starts with Xi’s snub of the West; global inflation to last for years; BRICS the real challenge to US-led order; Indonesia supports bloc but will not join; Manila ‘taking defence seriously’. The decision by US Continue reading »
Hong Kong can do nothing right, it seems. But it’s not the community’s fault: it lives on a fault line, trying to balance between two much larger, more powerful entities. Richard Cullen recalls a different occasion when two big powers, the US and the UK, had a difference of opinion. Often, much smaller communities end Continue reading »
Do you remember this?
If you do, congrats. People have short memories. But, yep, once upon a time, George W. Bush was the butt of everybody’s jokes. For very good reasons too, as you can see.
As a matter of fact, that wasn’t an exclusively American thing. Down Under Dabya was cause of much hilarity.
This clip, however, never made it to a top-10 list of Bushisms:
In Asian media this week: Bloc steps up challenge to old world system. Plus: Xi and Modi agree to ease border tensions; West loses ‘plebiscite’ on rules-based order; three-way ‘alliance’ confronts China, North Korea; US media support new China narrative; Biden to visit New Delhi but skip Jakarta; new Thailand PM a Thaksin confidant. The Continue reading »
In the early 1960s, the then USSR started building missile sites in Cuba, near enough to Florida for endurance swimmers. This almost led to the Cold War turning flaming hot. Now Australia is to buy more than 200 US missiles and stage them close to Indonesia. The Arafura Sea is too wide to swim, but the Continue reading »
There’s a lot of controversy over what China is doing in the South China Sea, but there seems to be very little in the way of perspective. The recent “water attack” on Philippines vessels was not a hostile act by a military nation, it was a Chinese Coastguard ship deterring another nation from building on Continue reading »