... decades, if at all, before the organization becomes a major player in the dynamics of the food security set-up. Food security and the BRICS may be realigned or rebranded or just fade away to accommodate changes brought on by younger leaders and online social media.
The United States. A pittance for food and water infrastructure
In the United States food security is “at risk.” There are debilitating droughts in the Sacramento Valley agricultural region and the strategic water network ...
After being told by Henry Kissinger that it was time to “modernize” FIFA president Sepp Blatter has turned football into a money machine that is expanding in Africa the Middle East and Asia, and maintaining a profitable scenario for marketing partners in a troubled global economy.
Reflecting on how football has become a global force during his long tenure as FIFA president, Blatter tweeted on March 23rd that...
“FIFA, with the positive emotions that football unleashes, is more...
... among intellectuals and policy wonks similar to what one saw in 1992 with the appearance of Francis Fukayama's “The End of Diplomacy.” Fukayama received a flurry of hype thanks to the internet as it existed at that time.
Using social media marketing, Naim's PR team even got a promotional quote from William Jefferson Clinton for the 2013 launch. The former US president claimed that The End of Power” ...“will change the way you look at the world.”
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Santa and his reindeer came from the North Pole and played Scrooge for futebol, the nation's most popular spectator sport. Poor attendance, lackluster play and massive debts find even the most famous clubs tightening their belts.
Players are griping because teams delay paychecks. Managers balk at signing for less money. Third party syndicates continue to own shares of players like slices of churrasco, dribbling around FIFA rules.
Government subsidized football hasn't improved...
... implementing free market policies. But critics of Modi say that the much heralded economic performance of his Gurajat state, based on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), is merely at parity with half a dozen other key industrialized states in India and the rest is social media hype. Gurajat is a state of 62.5 million in a nation of 1.8 billion located on India’s border with Pakistan, around 800 km south of Karachi. When Modi started out his first term as chief minister of Gujarat in 2002 he was accused of ...
Calling the BRICS development bank “an insurance policy against the risk of U.S. sanctions,” experts at the prestigious Brookings Institution have joined Washington’s effort to disrupt the Russian economy and punish nations who do business with it. Branded as the world’s most influential think tank with an endowment upwards of $262 million, Brookings has been on Uncle Sam’s payroll since 1916, providing guidance on domestic and international policy issues. In 2010 when...
It was calm along the Esplanade on the afternoon of Friday, May 23rd. Most demonstrators who protest in front of the futuristic buildings along Brasilia’s divided highway of government were gone for the weekend.
After former president Jose Inacio Lula da Silva (known as “Lula”) made headlines by saying that anybody who uses the Metro (in Rio and Sao Paulo) to travel to FIFA World Cup games is an “idiot” (babaça) it was the perfect time for president Dilma Rousseff’s...
“Close your eyes and you’re not sure if it’s an Israeli or a Saudi speaking.”
That’s what Daniel Levy, Middle East director at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), told The New York Times in an article dated March 31st. The ECFR, which has called for a greater role for Al Qaeda in Algeria to “promote democracy,” is funded mainly by George Soros.
The New York Times sourced Levy about the latest attempt by Israel and Saudi Arabia to cooperate...
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A replay of Kennan’s Cold War tactics of economic and political isolation and his psychological assessment of Russians as being inherently neurotic and inward looking are convenient for American “retail politics” and conversational social media but branded public diplomacy initiatives are proving themselves out of step with the fast changing realpolitik of our times.
Credit: Corbisimages
From battleground Berlin to battleground Kiev
Had Wolf lived and accepted the big money ...
... geopolitics The impact of the FIFA private investigation. The future of Edward Snowden and Victor Bout. Conflict resolution in Syria and Ukraine. All of these events will intersect in the next few months in the real world and in the virtual world of social media and digital diplomacy that thrives on the internet. For those who posit that geopolitics and hegemony are dead concepts, the convergence of these forces has the potential to change the geopolitical landscape in the same way tectonic plates ...
