Sunday’s Paris series of meetings of key world leaders, including a probable Trump Putin, secret or otherwise, meeting, will inevitably take place, while marking the 100th anniversary on the 11th hour of the 11th month, of the end of the First World War, will be meetings heavy on irony. Starting with the fact that in…
In 2013 the German publication Der Spiegel informed us that Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, GCHQ, had been planting malware in the systems of Belgacom (now called Proximus), a telecoms company of which the Belgian government has 53% ownership. It revealed that GCHQ’s ‘Operation Socialist’ involved technology that directed targets to websites which could then inflict malware or otherwise louse…
Merkel said that her country won’t fulfill its contractual commitment to provide the Saudis with hundreds of millions of dollars of arms this year until Riyadh responsibly answers all the questions pertaining to Khashoggi’s killing, which she even termed a “monstrosity” and promised that she’ll pressure her other EU allies to follow suit. For as…
The four-nation Turkey-Russia-Germany-France summit on Syria on October 27 in Istanbul had an impressive outcome. All participants – each with own interests – has some ‘takeaway’ from the summit, which itself is a measure of the success of the event. This is also important because the participants now have a reason to work together. Such…
The Russia-Turkey-Germany-France summit in Istanbul on October 27 is an extraordinary affair. The Kremlin has been deploying a wily strategy, downplaying the summit as just “comparing notes”, and not a breakthrough. Yet Istanbul is a de facto breakthrough in itself – on superimposed layers. It signals the top two EU powers acquiescing that Russia is in…
Totally under the radar of a news cycle consumed by the Pulp Fiction in Istanbul saga and the ever-mutating US-China trade war, leaders from no less than 51 Asian and European nations met in Brussels on Friday to talk about developing some measure of global stability. The day before in Brussels had been lost on…
