Corruption

BRATISLAVA – At least, that’s the thank-you letter Finland should send Slovakia.

I’ve never been to a Helsinki block party. But earlier this month, for a solid fortnight of the World Hockey Championship, Bratislava sure felt like one. By the end of their two-week drinking binge, I wanted the pickled Finns to grab their gold medals and get the hell out.

[Read part 1 here.] I’ve been following issues in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as usual, and fully exposed to US media coverage of the war in Afghanistan. (Note: what follows isn't a political criticism of "mainstream media, simply a personal thought regarding a subconscious biais present in American media).

I’ve now settled in DC, and my internship with the French embassy has been everything I hoped it would be, and more (by the way, the French cafeteria inside the embassy is awesome). Obviously, though, anything I write on this blog is just me and doesn’t reflect the position, thoughts or analysis of any anyone else – for better and for worse. Just to be clear, this means I do not speak for the French embassy, I do not speak for the French government, I speak for no one but me in my personal capacity as a blogger, no more, no less.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has crafted an ambitious agenda; two key planks of which are fighting Russia’s endemic problem with corruption and moving the national economy away from its reliance on extraction-based industries (primarily oil and natural gas production) towards more value-added pursuits-Medvedev’s current pet project is the construction of a Russian “Silicon Valley” outside of Moscow.  It all sounds like a well-reasoned plan for the future, yet it’s worth noting that his predecessor, Vladimir Putin, made many of the same pledges, but his eight years in office ended without any notable successes either in tackling corruption or in esta

Professor R. Brian Ferguson teaches anthropology at Rutgers University in Newark and is an anthropological generalist on the subjects of war with publications on tribal warfare, ethnic conflict, the archeology of violence, and war in ancient states. He is a critic of theories purporting to explain war as a result of evolved propensities to kill.

As American politicians and pundits searched for lessons to be learned from September 11, the paucity of domestic experts knowledgeable about South Asia was noted as a weakness the U.S. government had to address urgently, by cultivating a cadre of diplomats and linguists.

BRATISLAVA – It’s always nice to hear what a colleague’s up to nowadays.

However, I was both pleased and troubled to recently find one featured in The New York Times, as the “curtain-raising” anecdote of an unhealthy trend emanating from Brussels.

Audio interview with Greg Palast, author of the two New York Times bestsellers, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy and Armed Madhouse. When Palast, an investigator of corporate fraud and racketeering, turned his skills to journalism, he was quickly recognized as, "The most important investigative reporter of our time" (Tribune Magazine) in Britain, where his reports first appeared in The Guardian newspapers and on BBC television.