It had no fewer than three official themes, “Man’s Achievements on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe,” “Peace Through Understanding,” and “A Millennium of Progress.” Its symbol was a 12-story high, stainless-steel model of the earth, the Unisphere, which still can be seen in Queens, New York, where it was held. The New York World’s Fair […]
The April 7 Quebec provincial election saw Pauline Marois’ Parti Québécois suffer a shellacking. After 19 months of running a minority government, the sovereigntist PQ fell to 30 seats, a full 40 below the Liberals, who won 70 of the 125 seats in the National Assembly. Liberal leader Philippe Couillard will become the next premier of […]
The ideological rivalry between the western world and the Communist bloc may have ended a quarter-century ago, but national interests and realpolitik are with us still. Indeed, the antagonistic relationship between U.S. President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, is arguably more intense these days than it was between President George H.W. Bush […]
Are Russia’s actions in the Crimea and elsewhere in Ukraine illegitimate, or did Moscow have cause to intercede? Demography and history suggest that Russian President Vladimir Putin has more of a case than North American media and politicians would like to believe. In his March 4 press conference Putin provided his own interpretation of what […]
When I encountered my first Yiddish text in the archives of Canadian Jewish Congress, sometime in the early 1980s, I had never heard the language spoken. There it was, written in Hebrew characters, undecipherable. I am not quite certain, but my first brush with the idiom must have been in the form of old yellowed clippings from […]
If you think the struggle between the ousted pro-Russian president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and his pro-European opponents has been going on for months, think again. This is actually the second go-around. The first time was during the so-called Orange Revolution in 2004, when then Prime Minister Yanukovych faced off in a presidential election against […]
The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” has issued his annual report, accusing Israel of “inhuman acts” and “apartheid,” and has called on the UN to support a “legitimacy war” against the country. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. First, because the 47-member council, which […]
The Michigan State University geographer Harm de Blij, in the 2012 edition of his book, Why Geography Matters, writes about an “Islamic Front” in sub-Saharan Africa that stretches from Sudan, bordering the Red Sea in the east, to Sierra Leone on the Atlantic Ocean in the west. And the line cuts many countries, including Nigeria, Africa’s […]
You may remember this old joke from the 1990s: What is Communism? Answer: The transition between capitalism and capitalism. To this we can now add: What was the Arab Spring? In Egypt, it has been the transition between military dictatorship and military dictatorship, with a brief interlude of Muslim Brotherhood rule. Remember all the nonsense […]
Pakistan has been called “the most dangerous place in the world” by Pakistani journalist Imtiaz Gul, the executive director of the Islamabad-based Centre for Research and Security Studies. Throughout its history, this country of 180 million people — the second largest Muslim state in the world — has been subject to periodic military coups, often […]