By Jan Servaes LAGOS, Portugal | 8 June 2024 (IDN) — We all know that when Christopher Columbus landed in ‘America’ in 1492, he thought it was India. Much less is known about the Portuguese navigator Vasco Da Gama who was the first to reach the real India in 1498. This ‘discovery’ was due to […]
By Jan Servaes BANGKOK | 18 April 2024 (IDN) — Operation 1027 has caused a change in Myanmar. Since October 2023, the advance of the anti-junta coalition of the Arakan Army (or AA, a mainly Rakhine group), the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (or MNDAA, a predominantly Kokang group, a Han Chinese minority) and the […]
By Jan Servaes BANGKOK| 28 March 2024 (IDN) — The widening gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ is reflected in the progress reports on the feasibility of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). After the African Union already postponed the date for achieving their development goals to 2063, the United Nations Economic and Social […]
By Jan Servaes BANGKOK| 15 March 2024 (IDN) —There are already more than 1 billion netizens in China, more than 3 times the population of the USA and almost one and a half times that of Europe. This means that about 20% of the world’s internet users, or almost 1 in 5, live in China. […]
By Jan Servaes BANGKOK| 18 February 2024 (IDN) — On January 31, 2024, the Constitutional Court in Bangkok ordered the kingdom’s most popular political party to end its campaign to amend the country’s infamous defamation law – the lèse majesté law or Article 112 of the Criminal Code. Thailand has one of the strictest lèse […]
By Jan Servaes BANGKOk | 7 February 2024 (IDN) — Myanmar’s military junta has increasingly carried out unlawful airstrikes killing civilians in its military operations against a coalition of the People Defense Force (PDF) and ethnic armed groups (EAOs), Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on January 30, 2024, on the eve of the anniversary of […]
By Jan Servaes BANGKOK | 26 January 2024 (IDN) — General and former Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-o-cha opened his royalist shirt during a press conference on May 16, 2016 to reveal the dozen amulets on his chest. He explained that these would give him moral support in negotiations with Russian President Putin. Thus, Thailand’s then […]
By Jan Servaes MIAMI | 23 January 2024 (IDN) — It increasingly looks like Donald Trump will win while American democracy is faltering. This is what Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt contend in their new book “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point”. In “Tyranny of the Minority,” […]
By Jan Servaes* BRUSSELS | 25 October 2023 (IDN) — The European Finance Ministers recently revised the European list of tax havens. They added Antigua, Barbuda, Belize and Seychelles to the blacklist and removed the British Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Costa Rica, Cayman Islands and the Marshall Islands. The list includes Russia, Panama, and other […]
By Jan Servaes* MIAMI, USA. 6 October 2023 (IDN) — “There are a lot of things very few people—even my friends—know about me. Things like, when I was a kid, we often didn’t have coins to feed the washing machine in our apartment building, meaning we couldn’t do laundry and my clothes smelled of cat […]
Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search. Press ESC to cancel.
