Archive for the ‘World current affairs’ Category
Know your BRIC and your N11
December 18th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
As regular visitors to NightHawk will know, this blog has a strong international flavour on the grounds that Britain is not the world and we all need to know more about other parts of the globe. Certain countries are proving particularly interesting because of their rate of economic growth and potential for international investment. In […]
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Some sort of justice for Sarajevo
December 13th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
A few months ago, my sister and I spent a long weekend visiting Sarajevo [my account here]. We heard Bosniak and Serb accounts of the siege of the city – the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, lasting from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 or a total of 1,335 days. This […]
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The American presidential election (1)
December 9th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
As someone with a close interest in politics, I’ve been following the early stages of the race to be the next President of the United States. Of course, the race seems to have been going on for ages already, but the first real results in the primaries – as opposed to vacillating opinion polls – […]
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Forgotten World (115): European Union
December 7th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
In a sense, the European Union (EU) is always in the British media, but there is very little talk of the institution itself and how it works – instead we have (often misinformed) stories about a row over the budget or the latest proposal from the Commission. The EU is now an organisation with 27 […]
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Forgotten World (114): Malta
December 6th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Malta is an archipelago of seven islands including Malta itself, Gozo, Comino, Comminotto and Filfla and has a population of 400,000. Located south of the Italian island of Sicily between Europe and North Africa, it has been occupied by Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs and latterly France and Britain. Independence from Britain was achieved in 1964 […]
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Forgotten World (113): Somaliland
December 5th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Following the collapse of the military regime of Siad Barre and of the Somali state, the 3 million people of the north-west region of Somaliland declared independence in 1991, but Somaliland remains unrecognised as a sovereign nation. However, in the eyes of at least some international observers, over the last decade and a half, the […]
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Forgotten World (112): Kiribati
December 4th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Kiribati – the former Gilbert Islands – consists of 33 atolls that occupy a vast area in the Pacific. They stretch nearly 4,000 km from east to west, more than 2,000 km from north to south, and straddle the Equator. Many of the atolls are inhabited (the total population is around 100,000) but most of […]
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Forgotten World (111): Armenia
December 3rd, 2007 by Roger Darlington
It’s time for another week of postings in my long-running series called Forgotten World – a look at parts of the world that hardly feature in our media or thoughts. You can check the previous 110 entries here. Armenia was one of the earliest Christian civilisations and its first churches were founded in the fourth […]
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A Russian version of democracy
December 2nd, 2007 by Roger Darlington
As reported by the BBC and other media, today around 100 million Russians have the chance to vote for their parliament the State Duma. As background, I have written “A Short Guide To The Russian Political System”.
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How the Taliban treated women
November 30th, 2007 by Roger Darlington
Having just read “The Kite Runner” – the first novel written by Khaled Hosseini [my review here] – I’m now reading “A Thousand Splendid Suns”, the second novel by this master storyteller. Even more than the first book, this work spells out what it has been like to live in Afghanistan in the last few […]
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