Russia Taps Arctic Oil, Leaving Rivals in Its Wake

President Barack Obama’s weeklong trip to Asia comes at a critical time for U.S. foreign policy as all eyes are focused on Russian aggression in Ukraine while Asian politics are in turmoil. The trip was intended to demonstrate the president’s commitment to his 2011 “Asia pivot” policy initiative, but events in Europe as well as declining defense budgets, underscore what many critics depict as another hollow element in a growing list of policy stumbles.

The prime suspect in the single worst atrocity in the 30-year-bombing campaign of the Provisional Irish Republican Army finally faced justice April 9 after a decade and a half. Irishman Seamus Daly,43, was charged with 29 murders in Omagh, Northern Ireland, on Aug. 15, 1998.

As Yemen moves toward a new constitution, the local al-Qaeda branch seeks to destabilize the country while a weak central government faces the unsettling menace of additional armed groups all over the map. The result is a climate of insecurity that threatens to undermine the progress of the past two years and leave the Middle East’s poorest country exposed to further deadly unrest.

Special Economic Analysis
by Peter Warburton, PhD

Despite the improvement in the U.S federal budget that followed last year’s tax increases and government spending cuts, the underlying deficit is still running at about $900 billion per year, representing more than 5 percent of national income. Most of this shortfall is routinely financed by the additional issuance of U.S. Treasury bills, notes and bonds.

NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s participation last week in a call-in television show with Russian President Vladimir Putin may be the clearest indication to date that he is far from the conscientious whistleblower he pretends to be. It also may confirm suspicions among experts that Snowden worked for Russian intelligence when he stole millions of secret U.S. documents, most of them unrelated to National Security Agency work.

SITUATION REPORT

Thursday’s deal to defuse the increasingly tense situation in eastern Ukraine came after surprisingly quick talks in Geneva. It remains to be seen if the agreement will be fully implemented by Russia and its Ukrainian supporters, but it could be that Russian President Vladimir Putin no longer sees the conflict as serving the Kremlin’s long-term interests.