The water crisis caused by ongoing power outages of more than 20 hours a day has pushed Gaza Strip residents to dig unlicensed wells, disregarding the ensuing serious threats to the already scarce aquifer water stock. At the request of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Israel reduced its power supply to Gaza on June 19 from…
A popular thesis since the 1930s is that a natural progression exists from currency wars to trade wars to shooting wars. Both history and analysis support this thesis. Currency wars do not exist all the time; they arise under certain conditions and persist until there is either systemic reform or systemic collapse. The conditions that…
-Will he sign, or won’t he? – Moscow’s John Bull pub customers tried to second-guess the US President. The pub on the Nikitsky Boulevard in the centre of Moscow is a good watering hole that is frequented by the Foreign Office minor officials and sundry intelligentsia. – He won’t sign his own surrender, fervently said…
Twenty years ago, a run on the Thai currency triggered a financial crisis that quickly devastated the economy of the entire region, sinking the currencies of Thailand, Indonesia, and South Korea and ultimately spreading as far as Russia and Brazil. Far from ‘lessons being learned’, history looks worryingly set to repeat itself. On July 22,…
The so-called international coalition in Syria against ISIS supports the scourge it pretends to oppose. It’s largely a US operation, begun in September 2014, with minimal help from so-called coalition partners, mainly Britain and France, others mostly in name only. It has nothing to do with combating terrorism, everything to do with wanting Assad ousted,…
There is a famous scene in Shakespeare’s Henry V on the night before the battle of Agincourt, when the French lords speak of the inevitability of their coming victory. Puffed up with arrogance, they deride the English: “Do but behold yon poor and starved band.” Of course, all this is to be exposed as bombast when the over-confident…
