NewsTrust - Asia - Most Recent Stories: Opinion

Renouncing Islamism: To the brink and back again

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Independent - By Johann Hari - Nov. 16 (Opinion) - In the mosques across the city, I hear a fringe of young men talk dreamily of flocking to Afghanistan to "resist". Yet this whisper never has an immigrant accent. It shares my pronunciations, my cultural references, and my national anthem. Beneath the beards and the burqas, there is an English voice.

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To Catch a Tiger

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Atlantic Monthly - By Fred Kaplan - Jul. 02 (Opinion) - Though it was only a one-day news story in the United States, a momentous event occurred last spring, with worldwide military significance. After 26 years of heavy fighting, the Sri Lankan government decisively defeated an ethnic insurgency, killing all of its top leadership, whose bodies were displayed on national television. Massive victory parades followed.

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North Korea blast is a test for U.S.

Tue, 26 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

CNN - By Paul Carroll - May. 26 (Opinion) - ... it is important to focus on two things in the aftermath of the test. First, what does this mean for the threat that North Korea poses to international security? Second, what should our next moves be?

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Between Genghis and Caesar

Fri, 22 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

sptimes.ru - By Yulia Latynina - May. 22 (Opinion) - You may not have known it, but in terms of his biological progeny, Genghis Khan was the most successful man of all time. It is estimated that one in every 200 people is a descendant of the prolific 13th-century khan of the Mongol Empire. That means that his military strategy of killing and raping brought countless biological dividends for future generations

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Winning the Peace

Thu, 21 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New Republic - By Michael Schaffer - May. 21 (Opinion) - After a quarter century of bloodshed and somewhere over 80,000 deaths, Sri Lanka's civil war didn't really settle anything. It began in 1983 in a flawed-but-functioning postcolonial democracy whose leaders never seemed quite up to the task of integrating different ethnicities into one nation. It apparently ended on Sunday, in a still-flawed, newly-swaggering postwar democracy where that basic task of integration remains even more elusive.

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The Poor Get Poorer

Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Rana Foroohar - May. 20 (Opinion) - While Americans are worried about dips in their 401Ks, Asians are increasingly worried about more important things, like feeding their families, as the global recession continues to play out. I’m currently on my way to Asia (first Japan, then China and Hong Kong) with members of the Honolulu based East West Center, where I’m going to be studying the effects of the financial crisis here, and already, its clear that one major challenge is increased poverty.

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The St. Petersburg Times - Opinion - Islands Apart

Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

sptimes.ru - By Peter Rutland - May. 18 (Opinion) - Prime Minister Vladimir Putin descended on Japan last week, accompanied by a dozen governors and more than 100 Russian business leaders. Yet the visit failed to break the impasse in Russian-Japanese relations over the four islands east of Hokkaido, which Russia seized in 1945. This means that the two countries are still without a peace treaty and an agreed mutual border 64 years after the end of World War II.

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What Burma Needs From President Barack Obama

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Desmond Tutu - Apr. 20 (Opinion) - there is another issue on which America's moral leadership is desperately needed, and here, it must be acknowledged, President Bush was on the side of the angels: the struggle for human rights and justice in Burma.

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The Nut Graph | Scaling the language barrier

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0800

thenutgraph.com - By Wong Chin Huat - Mar. 04 (Opinion) - The standard of English has deteriorated in Malaysia, over the past decade, while the English language is enjoying increasing importance in a globalising world. Taking both these factors into consideration, isn't the call to abolish [the policy of English for Teaching Mathematics and Science] and reinstate the old status quo irrational and irresponsible? I don't think so.

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Secretary Of State Hillary Clinton's Trip To Asia

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Council on Foreign Relations - By Paul B. Stares - Feb. 18 (Interview) - he Japanese are clearly very happy that Secretary Clinton is beginning with her Asia trip with Japan. And they clearly are reassured that Japan still counts in Washington's calculus. Tell us what are the leading sort of issues that she's going to be bringing up with the Japanese and what she's looking to hear from them.

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Mrs. Clinton Goes to Asia

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

National Review - By Dan Blumenthal - Feb. 16 (Opinion) - In fashioning her Asia policy, Secretary Clinton has a chance to make a clean break with her predecessors, who tended to view every Asian challenge in isolation. The United States can begin to view Asia as a whole, with interconnected problems and multilateral solutions.

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YES! Magazine's Fran Korten on Her Friendship with Barack Obama's Mother

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Democracy Now - By Fran Korten, Amy Goodman - Jan. 26 (Interview) - Well, last week I had a chance to speak with Fran Korten. She’s the executive director of YES! Magazine. She joined me in the firehouse studio to talk for the first time about her friendship with Barack Obama’s mother, Ann Soetoro.

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Barack Obama, and America's place in the world

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Christian Science Monitor - By Helena Cobban - Dec. 15 (Opinion) - Most Americans have been watching the presidential transition here in Washington very closely. But another, much broader political transition has also been accelerating in recent weeks: the shift from the US-dominated world we have lived in since 1989 to one in which global power has become significantly more diffuse, more networked, and more Asian.

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One Day in Bangkok

Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Jarrett Wrisley - Dec. 04 (Opinion) - Some in the U.S. media have labeled Barack Obama the first celebrity politician. But those commentators have never been to a Thaksin rally.

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Groundbreaking 2-year backpacking odyssey across the 33 provinces of China

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

chinatravel.net - By Rebekah Pothaar - Nov. 11 (Interview) - A photographer, his camera, a backpack, two years, one country, 56 cultures, 1.3 billion people, 33 provinces and 56,000 kilometers.

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"The Majority of the World Supports Iran"

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Subrata Ghoshroy - Oct. 08 (Interview) - In an exclusive and wide-ranging interview, Chomsky discusses the global politics of Iran's and India's attempts to become nuclear powers.

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Memo to Obama, McCain: No one wins in a war

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

ZSpace - By Howard Zinn - Jul. 18 (Opinion) - BARACK OBAMA and John McCain continue to argue about war. McCain says to keep the troops in Iraq until we "win" and supports sending more troops to Afghanistan. Obama says to withdraw some (not all) troops from Iraq and send them to fight and "win" in Afghanistan. For someone like myself, who fought in World War II, and since then has protested against war, I must ask: Have our political leaders gone mad? Have they learned nothing from recent history? Have they not learned that no one "wins" in a war, but that hundreds of thousands of humans die, most of them civilians, many of them children? Did we "win" by going to war in Korea? The result was a stalemate, leaving things as they were before with a dictatorship in South Korea and a dictatorship in North Korea. Still, more than 2 million people - mostly civilians - died, the United States dropped napalm on children, and 50,000 American soldiers lost their lives.

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Terrorists in Bangladesh?

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Christian Science Monitor - By Selig S. Harrison - Jul. 08 (Opinion) - While the CIA and the Pentagon search in vain for Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Pakistan, an Al Qaeda affiliate has been quietly building up terrorist bases in the jungles of Bangladesh under the protective aegis of a new military regime in Dhaka allied with Islamist forces.

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Carrots for the General

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

3 Quarks Daily - By Edward B. Rackley - Jun. 23 (Opinion) - In the case of Burma under General Than Shwe and his military junta, no carrots have been tried, to my knowledge. Sticks in many shapes and sizes have been brandished and swung, to little effect. Economic sanctions, asset freezes, arms embargos and travel bans are currently in effect by the US and EU. I posed the question to a Burmese dissident last week. He reflected a moment, then smiled and said, 'A missile launch pad in Thailand, that's all we need'. No sticks, no carrots, just elimination: everyman's fantasy. Were regime change so easy!

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The End of Intervention - Why We Can't Help in Myanmar

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Madeleine K. Albright - Jun. 11 (Opinion) - THE Burmese government's criminally neglectful response to last month's cyclone, and the world's response to that response, illustrate three grim realities today: totalitarian governments are alive and well; their neighbors are reluctant to pressure them to change; and the notion of national sovereignty as sacred is gaining ground, helped in no small part by the disastrous results of the American invasion of Iraq. Indeed, many of the world's necessary interventions in the decade before the invasion -- in places like Haiti and the Balkans -- would seem impossible in today's climate.

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The Math of Myanmar's Survival

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

American Footprints - By China Hand - Jun. 02 (Opinion) - What the Myanmar government has to do is quite simple. It has to get the cyclone victims out of the relief camps and back into their villages, hope they can scrape together the bare necessities of shelter and food to sustain a working life, get them the wherewithal to plow and seed their fields, and make sure they finish up the planting in eight weeks from today--and twelve weeks after the worst natural disaster in the country's history.

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Why the Burmese Junta Failed to Respond to Cyclone Nargis

Sat, 24 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

The Irrawaddy - By Ko Ko Maung, Saya San - May. 24 (Opinion) - Bad news is constantly toned down for the supreme leader and analysis sweetened for his taste. In the end, any urgent calls for action were muted; his subordinates retreated timidly into corners while the natural disaster spun out of control. Millions of innocent people suffered as a consequence. As a former commander of offensives against Karen insurgents and civilians, Than Shwe's warhorse mentality must have bred a cold toleration for human suffering over the years.

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Is It Time to Invade Burma?

Sat, 10 May 2008 19:15:02 -0700

Time - By Romesh Ratnesar - May. 10 (Opinion) - The disaster in Burma presents the world with perhaps its most serious humanitarian crisis since the 2004 Asian tsunami. By most reliable estimates, close to 100,000 people are dead. Delays in delivering relief to the victims, the inaccessibility ...

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Southeast Asia: Rice and food price crisis

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Global Voices - By Mong Palatino - Apr. 28 (Opinion) - Prices of rice and other basic food items are increasing in the world. The global food price crisis is affecting millions, possibly billions of people. Food policies are challenged. Governments are imposing emergency measures to calm down their restless constituents. The Southeast Asian region, home to several emerging and developing economies, is also struggling to cope with the situation.

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Singapore materially rich, spiritually poor

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Agence France-Presse - Apr. 19 (Interview) - Singapore is materially rich but spiritually poor -- and the government is partly to blame, one of the city-state's most prominent authors says. Catherine Lim, also a political commentator, is one of a very few to publicly criticise the government in Southeast Asia's most economically advanced society. Lim said that while Singapore is consistently ranked high in various surveys on material measures, such as business friendliness and economic achievement, the standings are reversed when other factors are considered. "Press freedom, happiness and even love life and romance and so on, Singapore is ranked very low," Lim said in an interview with AFP.

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