Asia

Climate change is not at the top of Thailand’s national agenda. So far, changes in policy not been made to prevent climate change but in order to economise. Yet, there are hopeful developments at a grass roots level.

China is believed to be better prepared for the consequences of the financial crisis than all other emerging countries. But how deeply has China’s economy really been affected by the crisis, and what measures are being taken by its government?

The financial crisis has exposed structural problems in the Chinese economy: Its export trade is suffering from the slump in global demand. Bejing has underwritten investments, social programs, and subsidies to stimulate domestic demand, with little regard to the long-term environmental consequences.

US officials and media have exaggerated Pakistan's proximity to collapse. Yet, the speed of Pakistan's decline has surprised many inside in the country who have long warned of the effects of religious extremism. Pakistan's leadership will have to face the extremist threat.

An interview with Sunita Narain, director of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), on India's climate policy and its international and national context.

This toolkit is a joined venture of the Heinrich Boell Foundation Afghanistan and UNIFEM Afghanistan and an outcome of the joined research project on women legislators in Afghanistan.

The Football game between Armenia and Turkey in September 2008 and sports diplomacy.

The roundtable conference was conducted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in cooperation with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC). The report is an analysis of the roundtable recommendations.

The bulk of the media and parts of the intelligentsia, after first coming to terms with the Congress Party system, now prefer the two multiparty coalition systems: the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) or the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), even when the UPA is only going in for post-poll alliances with its erstwhile colleagues. The one thing that worries the media is a Third Front.

Despite the hopes of a bi-nodal party system since 1998, a secular alternative, reduced from being the second option in 1977 to the Third Front within a decade, has not ceased to linger in the background. It remains a parking space for satraps in search of greater role in national politics than their regional space would afford them.