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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 7-Jan-2010
7-Jan-10 News - Increased violence in the Caucasus

Web Log - January, 2010

7-Jan-10 News - Increased violence in the Caucasus

Also: Panic buying of kitty litter in Britain

Dear Reader, I'm going to try this for a while and see if it works for me. Ideally I'll produce a news summary every day, but that's probably unrealistic. I'll try to do it as often as possible.

Every day I come across one or more stories that I believe are very important (or just amusing). Often web site readers refer such articles to me. But my work schedule keeps me from writing a full article on them. The news summary will briefly cover stories that I believe are of international geopolitical or financial significance, and will provide a link to one or more articles.

Major suicide bombing in Russian province of Dagestan

The Caucasus is one of the most dangerous places in the world, since it's the nexus of centuries of wars between Muslims and Orthodox Christians. Ria Novosti reports that violence is increasing throughout the Caucasus, especially in Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia.

This follows after a suicide bomber car drove into a major police station compound in Dagestan, killing 5 police officers and wounding 14 others. The carnage would have been much worse, but a quick-witted police car driver prevented the bomber from getting into the crowded areas of the compound. The CNN story has a map showing the location.

Panic buying of kitty litter and thermal underwear surges in Britain

According to the Telegraph, the bitterly cold weather is causing people to stock up. Kinda makes you wish for more global warming, doesn't it.

History ends in 1990 in Bosnia and Herzegovina

One of the two bloodiest wars of the 1990s was the ethnic war in Bosnia and Herzegovina where an estimated 100,000 people were killed and another 2 million displaced. (The other one was the Rwanda genocide.)

A World Focus video says that kids in this region are learning history from textbooks that contain no events at all after 1990, just before the war broke out. "All possible content that could be insulting to any of the people of Bosnia was taken out of the textbooks. Most of the last 20 years of the history of our country is not in primary school textbooks," according to one Bosnian official.

"My personal opinion is that until all sides in Bosnia agree on facts about what happened in the last 20 years, I think it is good. But I hope that we will reach a time when some things could be described in the way they actually happened."

This kind of thing really fascinates me, and we've discussed it in Lebanon and Sri Lanka.

When a country enters a Recovery era following a bloody civil war, everyone walks on egg shells for fear that the war will break out again. But it can't, and won't until the next Crisis era, decades later. In the meantime, they take drastic steps like this one -- deleting 20 years of history from textbooks -- to keep anything from happening.

Ironically, this only pisses off the younger generation of kids who wonder why information is being kept from them.

Clash of Civilizations - Muslims vs Christians in Nigeria

Nigeria - Muslims in the north, and Christians in the south <font size=-2>(Source: Spiegel)</font>

Nigeria - Muslims in the north, and Christians in the south (Source: Spiegel)

A great Der Spiegel article describes the split in Nigeria between Muslims in the north and Christians in the south. This came about because the Arabs colonized the north, and the Europeans colonized the south. Both sides are becoming more radical, and Nigeria is in the news now because the Christmas day attempted jetliner bomber comes from Nigeria.

U.S. and China race to the bottom in trade protectionism

The U.S. is imposing high duties on wire decking products imported from China, Reuters reports. This follows duties on steel pipes, that the U.S. claims the Chinese are "dumping" at unfairly low subsidized prices. The Chinese say the U.S. ignores the facts that U.S. manufacturers can't compete in today's recession world economy, and is making China a scapegoat.

On the other hand, China is threatening duties on U.S. chicken parts -- chicken feet and wings -- because they're delicacies in the China.

Everybody is thinking about the Smoot-Hawley act of 1931, where the U.S. imposed high duties on imported goods, supposedly to save jobs. The tariffs made the Great Depression worse. They destroyed the Japanese economy, and is one of the factors that led Japan, ten years later, to bomb Pearl Harbor.

Ten Sci-Fi Weapons That Actually Exist

A Wired article about some neat stuff (assuming that there are neat ways to kill people). Plenty of great photos.

(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the Financial Topics and the Geopolitical Topics threads of the Generational Dynamics forum.) (7-Jan-2010) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 7-Jan-2010 7-Jan-10 News - Increased violence in the Caucasus