More madness here.

A wonderful opportunity has arisen for me; I have been asked to be a panelist at a conference in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Assuming that most of you don’t know much about this country I thought it would be handy to link to its wikipedia article here.

The subject of the conference is “Views from America 2008.”

(more…)

‘International talks aimed at ushering in a new era of free trade collapsed in Geneva yesterday during a bitter split between developed and developing countries over the future shape of global commerce,’ the Washington Post reports.’ (more…)

The Stevens indictment may very well cost the Republican Party dearly. Not for the first time, Republicans give people the impression that when it comes to corruption, etc. they are not only not better than Democrats but possibly even worse.

Will the Republican Party as a whole be held responsible for the crimes of one individual? Or will voters consider Stevens to be a crooked politician and not specifically a crooked Republican?

First people who support the Justice and Development Party (or AKP) and most foreign observers said that Erkenegon is an organization of Kemalists who are, of course, all fascists. Then the storyline became that they are not ‘normal’ Kemalists but extremists, who are despised by Kemalists as well as liberal democrats (partially true). But then the story changed even more; they were part of a mythical organization which has existed for hundreds, nay thousands, of years.| MORE ›

Senator John McCain’s campaign, and Republicans in general, have criticized Democratic nominee Barack Obama for not visiting American soldiers stationed in Germany when he visited that country earlier this month. The reason for the cancellation of the scheduled trip to the (wounded) soldiers is, according to some that is, that no tv network was willing or able to accompany Obama on his visit. (more…)

A prominent African-American AIDS organization has accused the United States government of ‘doing too little to fight AIDS among black Americans, in whom the size and scope of the epidemic resembles that seen in many African nations.’ (more…)

Radovan Karadzic has been extradited to the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, the Netherlands. There he will face charges of planning the genocide inflicted upon Bosnian Muslims living in Srebrenica, back in the 1990s. (more…)

There are three reasons, which are all fairly easy to understand, why oil prices have risen dramatically in recent years; Iran, the booming global economy and the weakness of the dollar. Especially the weakness of the dollar plays an important role. (more…)

‘There will be no more business as usual for housing lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac if John McCain is elected president. That’s McCain’s clear message in a recent hard-hitting op-ed in the St. Petersburg Times and in various straight-talk media interviews,’ Lawrence Kudlow writes for Real Clear Politics. (more…)