A new world is being born, one without the US dollar greasing the wheels of commerce, notes Eric Walberg Yekaterinburg, famous tragically as the spot Lenin chose to have the Tsar and his family executed in 1918, and ironically as the fiefdom of Boris Yeltsin, who finished off the Russian... » read this article

In a bold outpouring of public concern for Southeast Asia’s Mekong River, people from the six-country Mekong region and around the world have urged governments to abandon plans for hydropower development along the river’s mainstream. In the face of strong government backing for dam building on the river, which feeds... » read this article

Editor's Note: The Afghan growing resistance forces now controls over 72% of Afghanistan. Let us remember that while the western media has marginalised the resistance with the clever corruption of terms like "Taliban", "insurgency", "terrorists", etc. - they are in fact defending Afghanistan against an invading, occupying army. The imperial... » read this article

13 June 2009 The popularity of Danny Boyle’s recent film, Slumdog Millionaire has led to a surge of media interest in the Mumbai slum of Dharavi which is partially depicted in the film. An important part of many people’s motivation for going to see the film will have been the... » read this article

PHNOM PENH-  Sam Pov, a rice farmer in Cambodia’s western Battambang Province, is very worried that his land will be taken over by a foreign investor. "I've heard the rumours about [Kuwait and Qatar]. I heard they might get our land because they need food," he said. "The commune leaders... » read this article

10 June 2009 The US administration has signalled a more aggressive stance toward North Korea that will only compound an already tense situation in North East Asia. Speaking in France on Saturday, President Obama declared that the US would take “a very hard look” at its approach following North Korea’s... » read this article

1 June 2009 A little over a month ago, the Pakistani government acquiesced to the demands of the Obama administration to use brute force to eradicate radical Islamist influence in the north-west of the country, as part of the so-called AfPak war to secure American interests in Central Asia. The... » read this article

27 May 2009 North Korea’s detonation of a small nuclear bomb on Monday provoked immediate condemnation by the UN Security Council and sharply raised tensions in North East Asia. Pyongyang had been warning of further nuclear weapon and ballistic missile tests for weeks, insisting that the UN had to apologise... » read this article

War it is! Prime Minister Gillani announced to the Pakistani public on national television that the Government has decided to launch an operation against Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) 1 (Operation Rah-e-Raast or straightpath). Who wants peace? The Pakistani public opinion was divided on the peace deal. But the parties that played... » read this article

May 20 2009 The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran's death circa May 19, 2009, in circumstances we will never quite get to know, concludes a morality play. As the curtain comes down and we leave the theater, the spectacle continues to haunt us. We feel a deep... » read this article

21 May 2009 The crushing military defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) has been accompanied by immense suffering by the Tamil people of northern Sri Lanka. The merciless offensive carried out by Sri Lankan army and the right-wing regime of Rajapakse has slaughtered thousands, wounded many more,... » read this article

The country that was The United States is sinking deeper and deeper into the poisoned slough of their own making. Moral turpitude goes hand-in-hand with naiveté and arrogance. And nothing seems to have changed if it's not that there is now a president with acute intellectual abilities rather than an... » read this article

Editor's Note: It's interesting that in this report from Press TV, a U.S. Secretary of State, finally admits that the U.S. "created the Taliban in the 1980's to counter the Soviets' influence in the volatile region" in a quasi-justification for the support the CIA gave the Taliban in the 1980s. Hillary... » read this article

Editor's Note: According to a NYT article today, the Pakistan military has killed 700 "militants" in SWAT in the last 4 days. Obviously, the military has ceded Pakistan sovereignty to the U.S. under pressure from Richard Holbrooke and Hillary Clinton. Obama, under the guidance and direction of the Council on... » read this article

5 May 2009 Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari will undoubtedly come under renewed pressure to allow US military forces to wage war within Pakistan when he visits Washington this week for a trilateral summit meeting with President Obama and Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai. For weeks, the US political and military establishment... » read this article

18 April 2009 The latest growth figure for the Chinese economy released on Thursday has revealed a further slowdown in the first quarter of 2009. The official rate was 6.1 percent compared to the first quarter of 2008—the lowest since quarterly data began to be collected in 1992. The figure... » read this article

15 April 2009 The elemental eruption of anger on the streets of Bangkok on Monday has highlighted the political impasse facing the Thai working class. Frustrated at the ruling elite’s contempt for democracy, anti-government protestors, many of them from Bangkok’s poor, fought pitched street battles with heavily armed soldiers, only... » read this article

NATO backs US escalation of war in Central Asia By Chris Marsden 6 April 2009   The NATO 60th anniversary summit in Strasbourg, France, and Kehl, Germany, ended with a headline commitment for Europe to provide “up to” 5,000 additional troops for Afghanistan. This was the smallest commitment the European... » read this article

President Obama has said that Al-Qaeda has strongholds in Tribal Areas of Pakistan and from there they are planning to attack US. He also mentioned that the US plans to expand its ‘war on terror’ inside Pakistan. This statement of Obama coincided with another statement and that, from terrorist number... » read this article

30 March 2009 The new military strategy announced by President Barack Obama in Afghanistan marks a major escalation of the war in Afghanistan and the official transformation of Pakistan into a theater of US military action. Prepared behind the backs of the American people and with contempt for anti-war opinion... » read this article