Islamabad / AP Afghan and international forces freed the kidnapped son of a former Pakistani prime minister during a raid on an Al-Qaeda cell in Afghanistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan said Tuesday, three years after he was kidnapped in a hail of bullets. Ali Haider Gilani, son of Yousaf Raza Gilani, was “released from the terrorists” during the raid in ...

  Jerusalem / AFP Israeli authorities have refused to renew the travel documents of a leader of a campaign to boycott the Jewish state, officials said on Tuesday. Omar Barghouti is one of the most prominent campaigners in the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, which campaigns for a global boycott of Israel until, amongst other demands, the country withdraws ...

While speaking with a Chinese journalist recently about the American presidential election, he asked me what the best way was to translate Donald Trump’s election slogan, “Make America Great Again!” The two of us discussed several Chinese wordings that might be a suitable translation of this saying, and I suddenly realized this slogan is actually the exact same as Chinese ...

  Philippines president-elect Rodrigo Duterte’s pledge to restructure power in favour of the disadvantaged regions in the country looks quite ambitious, as he would need cooperation of political and business classes to realise this noble dream. The president-elect’s new plan to negotiate with China over disputed China South Sea, represents a departure from the Philippines’ traditional politics and will not ...

  Cal Wong China is preparing to invest RMB 77 billion ($11.9 billion) into domestic aviation infrastructure, with a particular focus on airports in rural areas, said the country’s civil aviation regulator at a State Council executive meeting last week. The announcement suggests this will be a multi-pronged initiative. One of the aims is to build more airports in remote ...

  Central Asia has no shortage of critical, politically fraught, logistically challenging, and financially important energy projects. There’s the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan India gas pipeline (TAPI) and the Central Asia South Asia Electricity Transmission and Trade Project (CASA-1000), both of which have been discussed in depth here at Crossroads Asia and feature in an excellent recent podcast from RFE/RL. But there’s another ...

  Much to Islamabad’s chagrin, the message coming out from Washington is loud and clear. Pakistan is now being asked to pay for F-16 jets out of its own pocket. The message that the U.S. Congress is sending to Pakistan after it threatened to yank financing for F-16 jets ordered by the country cannot be more categorical. Pakistan can still ...

  Michael Reilly On May 6, representatives of Taiwan’s Alishan Forestry Railway and Switzerland’s Matterhorn Gotthard Railway signed a “sister-railway” agreement in Taipei. Aimed at boosting technical cooperation and sharing marketing expertise between the two mountain railways, such an agreement would normally pass by unremarked outside railway circles and the local tourism industry. Indeed, the Alishan railway already has two ...

It’s the bread and butter of pundits to speculate what the world might look like after a relatively improbable but potentially disruptive event, like the U.K.’s exit from the European Union or a Donald Trump victory in the U.S. presidential election. The perceived probability of these “black swan” events is pretty high, after all, and contingency plans may be in ...

  BLOOMBERG Stocks rose around the world, as the bearish sentiment that has set the tone on equities markets the past two weeks eased amid a rebound in base metals. The yen declined a second day and Brazil’s real advanced. The MSCI All Country World Index climbed the most in three weeks, with U.S. equities climbing the most in a ...