Archive for the ‘World current affairs’ Category
The explosive growth in tourist numbers in Japan
April 22nd, 2025 by Roger Darlington
If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you’ll know that, following a professional visit to Japan in 1998, I’ve just made a return visit as a tourist for a more extensive trip. In 1998, there were 4.1M foreign visitors to Japan. By 2014, there were 13.4M. By 2024, the figure was 36.9M. This is […]
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A review of the ambitious work “Why Empires Fall”
October 27th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
John Rapley is a political economist at the University of Cambridge and Peter Heather is Chair of Medieval History at King’s College, London. Together they have written a work which essentially argues that currently the Western Empire faces the kind of challenges that led to the collapse of the Roman Empire around 500 AD. The […]
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How much do you know about Lebanon?
October 1st, 2024 by Roger Darlington
In my review of a 2010 book about Lebanon entitled “Beware Of Small States”, I wrote: “Lebanon has so often been the subject of intervention by other states, whether the rule of the Ottoman Empire until the end of the First World War, France in the mandate period from 1918-1943, the presence since 1948 of […]
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Corridors of Power: Should America Police the World?
September 25th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
This is the title of a new eight-part series which has just completed broadcasting on the BBC and is now available of the BBC’s iPlayer. An impressive array of senior figures speak with knowledge, candour and regret, making this one of the very best documentaries on global politics that I’ve ever seen. It looks at […]
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Making sense of politics in India – the world’s largest democracy
June 27th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
Elections in a country of the size and complexity of India are huge and difficult affairs. The Indian Constitution requires that voters do not have to travel more than 2 km (1.2 miles) from their homes to vote. At the recent election in April/June 2024, some 969 million citizens were eligible to vote and some […]
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I feel for the people of Pakistan
June 4th, 2024 by Roger Darlington
In April. I was in Pakistan for a two week holiday. We suffered the cancellation of an internal flight because of the weather and landslides on the road route that we had to take instead. This year, Pakistan recorded its wettest April Ince 1961 with more than double the usual rainfall for the month. Daytime […]
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The threat to democracy from the rise of populist parties
September 21st, 2023 by Roger Darlington
Almost one-third of Europeans now vote for populist, far-right or far-left parties, research shows, with wide support for anti-establishment politics surging across the continent in an increasingly problematic challenge to the mainstream. Analysis by more than 100 political scientists across 31 countries found that in national elections last year a record 32% of European voters […]
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A review of a new book: “The Russo-Ukraiinan War” by Serhi Plokhy (2023)
August 26th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
On 22 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale attack on Ukraine, intending to occupy the country and install a puppet regime in a matter of weeks if not days. This book was written between March 2022 and February 2023, so it covers the holding of Kyiv by the Ukrainians, the recovery of the territory originally […]
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Do you have a National Flag Day and, if not, would you want one?
August 24th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
My last holiday was to the three countries of the Caucasus: Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia. I was struck by the observation that each of these three countries has a national flag day. Wondering how common or how rare this practice is, I checked it out on Wikipedia and learned that over 50 countries – around […]
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The case for a wealth tax becomes stronger every day
June 20th, 2023 by Roger Darlington
“Tax extreme wealth to pay for the climate-related damage to the poorest, a group of more than 100 leading economists have urged. A wealth tax on the fortunes of the world’s richest people would raise trillions of dollars that could be spent on helping poorer countries shift their economies to a low-carbon footing, and on […]
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