Foreign Affairs

Clive Thompson is at it again — this time he’s just penned a long piece on Google in China for The New York Times Magazine: It was difficult for me to know exactly how [Kai-Fu Lee, head of operations for Google in China] felt about the company’s arrangement with China’s authoritarian leadership. As a condition of our meeting, Google had demanded that I not raise the issue of government relations; only the executives in Google’s California head office were allowed…

Stuff.co.nz: The cost of bringing justice to remote Pitcairn Island has already topped $14 million NZ, and there are several sex crime hearings still to go. That’s about $9 mil US. That’s over $200,000 US spent on each of the 42 residents. Wow.

Alright, I’ll admit it, I’m a map junkie. And I’m also a sucker for foreign policy discussion. So this morning, I find a link in the Canadian Cartographic Association’s blog an entry about one Prof. Thomas P.M. Barnett, who has this new book called The Pentagon’s New Map. His thesis is as follows: “The maps on these pages show all United States military responses to global crises from 1990 to 2002. Notice that a pattern emerges. Any time American troops…

“The Iran Plans”, The New Yorker; April 17, 2006: In recent weeks, the President has quietly initiated a series of talks on plans for Iran with a few key senators and members of Congress, including at least one Democrat. A senior member of the House Appropriations Committee, who did not take part in the meetings but has discussed their content with his colleagues, told me that there had been “no formal briefings,” because “they’re reluctant to brief the minority. They’re…

When I blogged about this last summer, the figure, according to Computerworld, was this: About 8 million passports are renewed annually out of some 57 million passports in circulation. Now I read in Slate, from 2001: The United States issues three types of passports. There are currently about 44 million holders of the familiar, blue tourist passport (a few thousand people have green passports issued during the bicentennial of the U.S. Consular Service). About 400,000 have a maroon-covered “official” passport.…

The scene: Curt Poff (Macworld’s Online Managing Editor) and Cyrus Farivar (Macworld’s Assistant Editor) sit across from one another in the offices of Macworld. It’s still early in the day, so hardly anyone else is around. Curt gets up and walks past Cyrus’ desk: CP: “You know, it’s funny that Bush is still calling our forces in Iraq a coalition.” CF: “Who’s left in our coalition?” CP: “Us, Britain and about eight Pakistanis who can’t get out. Their visas expired.”…

Ok all you oil pundits and economy experts out there, riddle me this: So the current price of oil is about $60 a barrel. That means that one liter of oil is $60 divided by 159 liters (= 1 barrel), which is $0.37 per liter. Amazon (yeah, it’s weird, I know) will sell you two liters of Coca-Cola for $1.19. That means that Coca-Cola is more expensive than oil. Huh? Let’s review: 2 liters of Coca-Cola: $1.19 2 liters of…

Is that former Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) is now lobbying his wife, Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-NC) on behalf of Dubai Ports World. John of Americablog.com says it best: As if this deal to sell off control of US ports to the United Arab Emirates couldn’t become any sleazier, we now have former Republican Senator Bob Dole being hired as a lobbyist to influence – who? – HIS OWN WIFE. Yes, Bob Dole’s wife is a Republican Senator from North Carolina.…

WashPost Op-Ed by William Easterly (via Drezner): Jeffrey Sachs and Angelina Jolie toured the continent on behalf of MTV, with Jolie asking how we can stand by and let it be destroyed. The world’s leaders gathered at the United Nations in September to further discuss ending poverty in Africa, apparently unfazed by yet another voluminous U.N. report highlighting the failure of the grand plans (the “Millennium Development Goals”) to make any progress. They repeated a familiar refrain: If aid efforts…

Slate: And that is why as a Muslim American I am enraged by the publication of these cartoons. Not because they offend my prophet or my religion, but because they fly in the face of the tireless efforts of so many civic and religious leaders—both Muslim and non-Muslim—to promote unity and assimilation rather than hatred and discord; because they play into the hands of those who preach extremism; because they are fodder for the clash-of-civilizations mentality that pits East against…