Cafepolitico.us Blog

The Dalai Lama will be coming to Boston April 30th-May 3, 2009 and will be giving a series of lectures as well as being the guest of honor at the new Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT. I am going to one of his workshops this upcoming Saturday.
The Tibetan-American community [...]

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The most enraging thing about the billions of dollars private contractors have been squandering with their profitable contracts in Iraq (and other places), is how there are so many reports piling up that they are not even providing the very services required under the contract, or worse, doing such a piss-poor job that it is [...]

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Yesterday I blogged about South Africa’s refusal to issue a visa to the Dalai Lama to attend an international peace conference in Johannesburg- the reasoning given by the SA government was that it was not in their best interest to allow His Holiness into the country lest it upset China, with whom SA has increasing [...]

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As if toxic pet food and pharmaceuticals aren’t enough, now we are going to import condoms from China because they are a little bit cheaper? Of course they are cheaper! The question is, do they do what they are supposed to do? I guess some people may find out, the hard way.

In [...]

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China continues to throw it’s economic weight around and seems to have been successful in ensuring that other countries ignore it’s deplorable human rights record.
When Secretary Clinton went on her first overseas trip to Asia, she managed to appease a nervous Chinese Government by declaring that China’s worsening human rights, rigid communism and [...]

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So far, things don’t look to good for the two US journalists being held in North Korea. I am sure a lot of behind-the-scenes wrangling is going on at the State Department, but if the US can’t get them back without having to give in to N. Korean concessions, this could get ugly.

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President Obama is not even two full months into his first term and by all accounts, he has hit the ground running and is trying to deal with two wars, an economic disaster he inherited, education, health care and strengthening ties with international allies and rehabilitating our image among friend and foe alike.
Of [...]

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Yesterday, reports of Chinese and US naval maneuvers off the coast of Hainan Island, demonstrate an underlying tension between the two countries. The US Navy was operating in international waters when China began initiating provacative and clearly aggressive actions against the US Ship Impeccable, almost causing a collision between the two vessels:

In a dangerous [...]

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I came across this article in the NY Times the other day about how moving towards more of an international consensus on climate change seemed to be pipe-dream just five years ago, particularly with respect to getting some of the world’s biggest polluters on board (ie. China). However, since President Obama has come out [...]

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I find this interesting, particularly given Secretary of State Clinton’s dismissive remarks about human rights while she was in China last week. One really can’t talk about Darfur without also talking about China, particularly given the major oil companies in Sudan are largely Chinese companies. So I am not sure how to reconcile [...]

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